I've been looking through the scan website and notice that the i3 is £92 and phenom 2 555 is £80 and the motherboards are about the same price and of course they use the same ram if you are buying new . I've been wondering for ages about which one I would go for. I've been doing huge amount of reading about the various CPUs available. and it seems like the new i3 is about 15 to 20% faster than the e8400. And the E8400 was in itself a bit faster than the AMD 550be at standard clock speed. And of course the AMD costs a lot less and if you're lucky has the possibility to unlock cores. Etc etc.
Anyway, am I missing something because depending on your use the i3 seems quite good value, particularly as I'm going to use it for voice recognition which requires zero graphics ability but a lot of processor power.
I'm not even considering the i5 or i7 well beyond my budget.
I be quite interested in knowing some accurate data about power consumption, because my computer is basically never off. I worked out once that my stereo which was old, used 28watts on standby and I worked out that equated to about £28 of electricity in the course of the year, so it does add up.
This anyone know of any really reliable power consumption tests of these CPUs, because there seems to be a huge variance in the tests one sees posted up on the web.