Which CPU is best for me?

[mazinya]

Do you think that the Arctic Cooling Alpine 7 would be enough to cool the 720BE? Is it quiet?

 

[maroon1]

That depends on what you are doing. Plus take into account performance per dollar. It's so wrong when people compare an I7 975 to the AMD 955, you don't use stock clock speed as reference to compare you use price. It's I7 920 VS AMD 965 currently that are the same price range. And in gaming, the 965 has an edge. Actually, if you left it stock clock speeds, the 965 would probably beat the I7 in everything. 2.66 VS 3.4 GHZ, huge difference especially with gaming benchmarks and real world gaming as well.

My friend, i7 920 @ stock speed does beat AMD 965 @ stock speed most of the time
Here some reviews
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-x4-965,2389.html
http://www.guru3d.com/article/phenom-ii-x4-965-be-processor-review-test/%5Dsource
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/08/17/amd-phenom-ii-x4-965-black-edition-review/1
nandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3619&p=1

In gaming they perform about same, but i7 920 is do much better in other things. And remember that all current games can't use more than 4 threads.

 

[87dtna]

My friend, i7 920 @ stock speed does beat AMD 965 @ stock speed most of the time
Here some reviews
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-x4-965,2389.html
http://www.guru3d.com/article/phenom-ii-x4-965-be-processor-review-test/%5Dsource
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/08/17/amd-phenom-ii-x4-965-black-edition-review/1
nandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3619&p=1

In gaming they perform about same, but i7 920 is do much better in other things. And remember that all current games can't use more than 4 threads.

Wow, thanks for taking me down easy anyway! I had no idea triple channel memory made that much difference....I knew the I7 having 8 threads would beat the 965 in pretty much everything else, but I had no idea by that much margin. I also knew games only use 4 threads, which is why I thought with gaming the 965 would do better. It appears the 955/965 are basically the same performance as core 2 quads, maybe slightly better but not much. I7 920 beats the 965 in 9 out of 10 ten tests, very impressive I must say. I kinda thought that twice as much L2 cache per core would help a ton with gaming along with 800 mhz faster clock speed, guess not.