time to break open those piggy banks

too expensive for me

#1, don't kill the piggy.

Well, considering this is the pre-ordering price, what do you expect? Wait three months and everything expect the CPU will be 20% off MSRP.

Who knows what sort of defects are lurking on this new tech. Definitly wait 3 months after release before buying into it.

I guess for those of us using 32bit OS there will be no need for all 6 slots, and we will be able to use all 6 slots with 64 bit OS....

Your fortune with a 32bit os is going to be relatively shortlived anyway. After all microsoft will cease making security updates for xp within the next 1½ years anyway, and thus a vista 64 does all of a sudden seem attractive to anyone who installs a new legal windows.

As for the prices - c2d wasn't a bargain when it was new either, so it's not much of a surprise.

We can just hope amd rediscovers its talent and launches some super cpu with great oc potential for use in their existing motherboards. Then the intel prices will fall to reasonable levels. But that won't happen

Ugh....
There goes my video card and my sweet case... Its good to see progress on this but I more expected the board to be like 250$ not 400$ ( yeah i know its nieave) I hope that the real price after they come out is significatly less.

And yet they are all gonna have ps/2 and ide still....

Are you sure about that? even the ich9 doesn't support ide anymore (asus, gigabyte, msi etc. add support with jmicron or other seperate controllers)

Just think how much higher this will be if amd where to die.

Amd has better MB's then Intel at the same cost.

AMD has no motherboard at this cost or speed so this isn't a fair comparison. P45 vs. 790FX/GX is more relative.

The CPU prices look decent actually. According to what I remember, when Core 2 was released, only the extreme edition was available for some time. This time they are offering 3 options, which is nice. At $284 for a newly released technology, that's respectable. The motherboards on the other hand look like "top-of-the-line" versions. The Asus one mentioned includes a (who-knows-how-useful) LCD display for overclocking and onboard SAS, which I'm sure raises the price at least $150. The not-so-feature-rich motherboards will be a bit expensive, but nothing like mentioned above. I'm sure the standard motherboard prices will be closer to MSI's $300. Plus, let's hope they all throw in SLi !

I'm willing bet that these prices will be even higher come release day.

Any ideas if current power supplies will work? I see an ATX connector - but I was also reading about a six phase power outlay ...

First, i just want to say the links do not work (you have to edit them to access the link). Second, I agree that these are launch prices and it will go down once supply becomes sufficient. I also agree that competition (if amd can dish out some) will help lower these prices further. These first batches, iirc, would not support SLI yet due to the late announcement of Nvidia. It would indeed be best to give it a few months.

This is the same thing that happened in the nvidia vs ati/amd war.

The competition didn't have a good enough product to throw into the fray, so nvidia cranked the cost of their GTX 200 series cards to make a nice profit. amd/ati finally released a competing product and brought the prices back down.

Now we're seeing the exact same trend in the CPU market, Intel has no competition to speak of, so they're going to rake in the profits as long as they can with inflated pricing.

"Core i7 PCs Will Be Expensive" - Well DUH! All new cutting edge tech is pricey. Did you know that bears are catholic and the pope sh1ts in the woods?

AMD is looking better and better.

The motherboard is expensive, how much of that is the intel chipset cost to MSI though? I think MSI is raking in a profit on the new tech.

The CPUs themselves don't seem outrageously expensive imo. And the tripple channel ram is a non issue, the more RAM i can cram into a system the happier I am.

so your saying people with windows vista 32 will be out in the cold too

I have to agree on that 32 bit windows will be the mainstream at least 5-6 years... The next windows 7 is 32 bit, the 32 bit Wista has much more installs than 64 bit version... So most programs including games will be 32 bit versions at least the same 5-6 years... Hopefully we will see some games that use more than one or two cores before that.

I7 will come down in prize, but without AMD "support" it will take some time...

I'm just going to wait it out until prices drops and maybe till they release the second line. This way prices won't be so high and I'll have a larger list to choose from. I still have my overclocked E4300 @ 3.2ghz and it still preforms good enough for me right now.

there aint no reason those i7 boards need to be that high unless they are super duper extreme, multi layer, multi phase, 3x16 PCIE, overclocking behemoths with every feature but the kitchen sink thrown in.

Uhh,well they do have the maximum level of PCI-E and they have Crossfire and SLI..that's gotta count for something.

@ captaincharisma & hannibal :
All I'm saying is that xp 32 is shortlived. Vista 32 can as far as I know be replacded with a 64bit version without buying a new license (not sure about this claim). Anyhow, as long as directx requires a copy of a significant amount of framebuffer in ram, 32bit is on the losing side in a war of tech. Graphics cards get more and more memory, displays and texture resolution keep getting bigger and bigger, and at some point people will want the ability to precache levels for games even if they do own a good graphics card and run in high resolutions. So perhaps there will be support for 32bit vista in 5-6 years, but I don't believe it's a viable os for anyone playing games or using professional software. It'll probably be enough for ice or mce stuff, but that's it.
Anyway, is the next windows really going to have a 32bit version? that seems a bit wasted imo! Better spend more time making the 64bit work instead of making two version that don't like they did with vista.

@ warezme :
I believe they do have more or less any feature available to them. Just like nvidia any tech company without an immidiate funding shortage will release only the really high end product to begin with, and add midrange and lowend products along the way when their stock of 'old' stuff is closer to depletion or the marked situation is changed by 3rd party. And as always prices reflect the premium it will be to own such hardware. Not much different from the $650 price tag on my 8800gtx back when it was new. Premium products cost premium, even if their performance doesn't truely match

This has been confirmed. There will be two versions of them... and yes it would be better for us gamers to only have the 64 bit version... *sigh*

I hope that my "future prediction" is a wrong one. But when you look how long time it has been taken until even so so usefull dx10 titles has been starting to appear, or even games that use more than one core, I am geared towards some pessimism...

There've been directx 10 titles ever since the mid of 2007, but as yet there's been no compelling reason to run any of those titles in dx10 mode.
That is except stalker clear skies. I'm not sure how it looks in dx10, but the graphics are dreadful in dx9 on my system.

I was holding off on buying a quad core based PC thinking the release of Core i7 will push prices down on the last generation but it seems these two lines won't be directly competing with each other. Maybe prices won't go down much.

I really want this technology in laptops within the next 3 months

Q4 2009 will see i7 based notebook.