Core i7 leakes

[shaithis]

kalniel answered that nicely for me

Also, anyone that's tried it will tell you that "future proofing" only works for ~12 months, after that it's anyone's guess what will happen in the market......and if you can't afford to upgrade very often you best bet is buying when prices give the best value for money, surely? and i7 in the foreseeable future will not be good value unless your going to be heavily utilising its raw number crunching power.

There are some applications that if you use frequently enough (especially in a professional setting) that could justify an i7 purchase without hesitation. Gaming just doesn't come close to cutting it though.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

true. im just worried that a core 2 wont last me in gaming for over 2 years before the cpu holds back my system.

i have a p4 northwood and i got that near enough the time in which the next gen after the p4 came out and my p4 lasted me only about 2 years before it started aging real heavily due to the cpu and not being able to buy a pcie gpu card

[kalniel]

i have a p4 northwood and i got that near enough the time in which the next gen after the p4 came out and my p4 lasted me only about 2 years before it started aging real heavily due to the cpu and not being able to buy a pcie gpu card

It's always hard to predict the future, but you can do some research and give yourself a headstart.

For example when replacing my pIII computer I had the choice between an affordable Pentium D or a slightly out of budget X2. But the reviews were very clear - the X2 absolutely thrashed the Pentium D in the areas I was most interested in, so I cut back elsewhere (got a cheap motherboard that took AGP and PCI-E, then carried over my AGP graphics card etc.) and as a result it's lasted me a very long time.

Looking at the Core i7 compared to the core 2 though only shows big improvements in areas like rendering - so if that's what you'll use it for then absolutely it's worth splashing out. On the otherhand we know now that Intel don't keep the same motherboards for long, and it's quite likely that future generations of nehalem will need different boards anyway.

If your usage is gaming then you're right about the importance of a PCI-E slot - hence my choice of mobo back in the day as well. So what can you do here? Simple - buy a P45 based board which supports PCI-E 2.0 - that's a spec which isn't used at all today (performance wise), but come the distant future with uber games and uber graphics card it's going to be far more important than the difference between core 2 and i7.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

i will not render anything. i wil use my pc for gaming, programming, watching 1080p hd movies, abit of (photoshopping, music produciing and maybe some video editing)

basicly a pc that can do everything but gaming and programming being the primary drive for it all the rest are just extra hobbies, nothing serious or professional on the other stuff.