The "REAL" price difference between a Phenom 2 and I7 System - Page 7

Sorry, but I don't believe that is the legal definition of anticompetitive pricing practices, at least as espoused on Wiki:

As I said before, as long as Intel is selling the SOC at a profitable level instead of taking a loss, they can't be accused of dumping.

Note that the use of rebates per se is not in the definition, although rebates tied to excluding another manufacturer would be part of "exclusive dealing".

But pricing the Atom CPU above the SOC price, does not fall into any of the above categories. It's Intel's product and since they are clearly not 'dumping' it on the market, they should be free to charge whatever price they want for it.

Barriers to entry : Selling a SoC cheaper than a single item (cpu) fits, as nVidia cant enter this market do to exhorbatant cpu pricing vs SoC

Limit pricing : see above

Tying : In this case related, but also forced, again, due to pricing

Coercive monopoly : Somewhat applies, as the only one that currently is trying to offer anything other than the "standard" offered by Intel, is nVidia

In a sense he's right (shocking!) if you don't include sales from Dell online. The rest of the online sale of individual components pales in comparison to how many people buy from the local department store.

DDR3 is often lower latency than DDR2 right now, actually. Since the numbers are in clock cycles, you have to compensate for the fact that clock cycles are faster in DDR3. For example:

DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 actually has a CAS latency of 4 cycles at 1/(800 million) seconds per cycle. This comes out to 5 nanoseconds.

DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 has a CAS latency of 8 cycles at 1/(1600 million) seconds per cycle. This also comes out to 5 nanoseconds. You can get DDR3-1600 with a latency of 7 cycles (4.375 nanoseconds, IIRC) for a perfectly reasonable price right now, and it will beat all DDR2-800 with a CAS of 4 or above in latency.

To go to extremes, the lowest latency DDR2 on the market right now that I can find is DDR2-1000 with 4 cycle latency. This comes out to 4 nanoseconds. However, the top DDR3 is DDR3-2000 with 7 cycle latency, which is 3.5 nanoseconds. In addition, the DDR3-2000 CAS 7 is running at a voltage closer to the JEDEC spec, and because of this, it will be under less stress, causing less heat, and likely overclock farther.

This is true, I run 3GB Dual Channel (2x1GB 2x512MB)and my comp never goes over 2.5GB while gaming. And multitasking isnt really a fair comparison, I could open up 1200 IE windows all on a flash-based website and likely witness it wanting to use 16+GB. It's up to the person who uses the PC that determines how much RAM you need, there is no magic number, do you really think servers use only 4GB?

I dont use photoshop so I've never really had an issue with that. I would guess modelling programs, animation programs, Photoshop, etc. would eat memory like crazy, but what about the CUDA boost the new photoshop has?

And you aren't an Intel fanboy are you, Psycho?

Gosh, I find 8GB too restrictive... that's when I have a million things open in Corel Painter and Adobe Illustrator.

This is the usual Intel versus AMD discussion topic, which IMO is always great to read...

In the real world, I7 is a great CPU for people that need multitasking performance, which usually are the people that do a lot of video editing, heavy program compiling, 3D modeling and rendering and VMWare ESX or other virtualization OS (which is my own case). This extra performance is really important in these cases and it's worth $100 or $200 more depending on the comparison on other AMD or Intel CPUs which also PC enthusiasts are willing to pay.

On the other side of the real world, the mass market even a Pentium Dual-Core 2.5GHz is a great CPU, so i see the CPU choosing issue more as a question of brand flavour, preferences and finance than anything else.

I have a friend that uses mainly the PC to play, that did an upgrade for an Intel E8400 3.0GHz about 2 years ago and keeps investing in top graphic cards since he feels no need for more CPU processing speed or even more cores, even running at the sametime the usual programs like antivirus, firewalls, trillions of microsoft stuff, firefox with 10 tabs, etc. His feeling is that the E8300 will last perfectly 2 or 3 more years.

It's like buying a new car when you like that expensive BMW even knowing that the equivalent Audi costs less, has less 7 hps but accelerates 0-100Km/h only in less 1 second and has only little more fuel consumption and CO2 emissions... but hey, i like the BMW because it's faster and i can afford it! :-)

I prefer AMD to Intel, why you'd ask?

Well, push pins dear Watson!

Lies!

Pushpins suck as do Intel stock coolers in general. Even when I ran my E8190 as my main rig, I did not use a stock cooler. I find it sad when a 5yr old Thermaltake cooler can do better to cool a 3.6ghz overclocked Wolfdale passively than a stock intel cooler can a stock E8400 @ full load SMP folding.

Intel stock coolers are easy to mount. It's getting them off that sucks.

I tought Tom's hardware had some class, but according to this thread, i was way wrong.

If you are looking for the most basic Phenom II system, then yes, it will cost a lot money LESS than core i7, but when building about equal performance system (Both with mobo with about the same features, same ddr3 memory and so on) the price will be about the same, -/+10% .. But ofcourse i must pull the overclocking card, OC i7 920 with market (air) cooler will beat about any other processor (even core i7 965, probably even 975?).

+1

LOCK THIS DAMN THREAD ALREADY

buy amd and force intel to lower prices, then everybody wins

Should have waited at least another 2 years to resurrect it and talk about how we are all stupid because some 12-core CPU beats everything discussed here.