New Core I7 build...

Built new gaming rig for a friend/customer 2 weeks ago and he hasn't picked it up yet so I'm still playing around with it.

Core I7 rig spec:

Intel Core I7 920 (stock cooler)
Asus P6T Deluxe MB (first ordered Intel X58 but got blue screen of death, so returned & got Asus board)
CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 memory
1TB WD Hard Drive
SAPPHIRE 4850 in CF
Cooler Mast HAF full tower case with Hiper 880w PSU
LG BluRay/HD DVD drive
Vista x64

Frankly speaking, I'm not that impressed with the Core I7. Don't get me wrong... Its fast but compair to my AMD X4 9950/790FX(@ 3Ghz) setup and my other friend's Q6600/P45 (above 3.2Ghz) setup, I thought that I7 would really out-perform but with the gaming we do (Crysis, Fallout 3...) and general computing, we really can't notice the big difference.

If you're not in to serious gaming, save your money and get the Intel Q6600 & AMD 9950. You could save up to $500 on a rig.

You obviously dont know how to build a i7 rig to take full adavantage of the i7 cpu.

i7s are greatly bottlenecked by slow hard drives like the one you picked.

OC that puppy to 3.8-4.0 and throw in some raptors in raid 0 or even better throw in some ssds in raid 0, and then that baby will show you what she has.

I got 4 30g OC SSDs paired with my i7 and this baby stomps some serious ass compared to my e8400 @ 4.0 with 2 western Digital 640s in raid 0. And lets not forget that my e8400 @ 4.0 is faster at gaming then your Phenom and your friends 3.2 q6600.

Lets not forget your i7 buddy can go with ATI or Nvidia, anytime he wants, and you will have to buy a motherboard if a better GPU comes out in a flavor your mobo dont support.

first, i was just pointing out the it not a right time to upgrade to i7 if you already have intel & amd quad cores. it doesn't make sence to spend $800+ on cpu/mb/ram to get little performance out of it...

second, i didn't pick out the hdd, my friend did. he didn't wanna spend $300~400 on a hdd.

Interesting bench, you know imo it's always worth the upgrade if you have the money...

^ Good point. OP can get a E8400 + board for the same cost as the i7 920.

To be fair, upgrading from 2 7200 rpm drives to 4 SSDs without changing the processor should result in a way snappier interface. That could very well be the sole reason you feel the system is much faster.

There are two real reasons to upgrade to an i7. One is that your system is old enough you're building from scratch, and a 775 system would not be as future-proof. The other is that your usage pattern would benefit from i7. Most gaming usage does not qualify - even fast multicard setups can have driver problems negating the advantage of an i7. People who do volume encoding, compression, and other parallelizable processing stand to benefit the most.

Well I personally like a totally optimized system, not just a gaming optimized system. Its annoying when you try to do everyday things and its slow because you made it to be game optimized.

CPU's do some work in games, especially ones that are optimized to take advantage of multiple cores. the hard drives don't really matter much. they're fine, and waiting another 7 seconds for things to load compared to the extra money spent for the SSD's is something to think about.

I would classify them as ~3x the cost actually, since $/GB is the relevant value IMHO, not dollars in total. A pair of velociraptors gives you 600GB, and I know that I certainly use the extra space.

Of course, if you don't need a lot of space, RAIDed SSDs is certainly an option to look into.

Yeah, but all 760GB isn't full speed. Therefore, the benefit is not obtained in the full 640GB. I have a separate 1TB volume in mine as well for extra storage, but I don't count that in the app space, nor do I factor it in to cost per gig of the main volume.
One of my games for example (X-plane 9) takes 60GB by itself, and as it's a flight sim, is constantly streaming data off the disk. That would have to be put on a much slower drive if I just had the SSD RAID setup.

I'm not saying that SSDs are a bad idea, but you do have to consider both the amount of speed and the amount of storage to get the full idea of what is the best for you. In my case, it's something with a minimum of 500 gigs. In your case, it isn't. In both cases, we're happy