Do you think we will see an even greater price drop in GPU's and CPU's because of the fourth quarter drops? I feel that computers are already one of the most popular products in the world, and one day, the latest tech will cost no more then a few hundred. I hope so, i want a 260gtx for 100 bucks

Doubt it. I just bought a Q6600 G0 off eBay because the Q9550/9650 I had in mind are over $200. I refuse to pay more than $200 for mid range product.

uhh... Aren't most processors x64 now?

x86 (aka AMD64) is an extension to x86, and so I assume that the term "x86 CPUs" above is including both 32bit and 64bit x86 processors

No, x86 is an architecture/instruction set, derived from the 8086 cpu. AMD and Intel processors use the x86 instruction set. Most IBM processors use the Power architecture. Though Cisc and Risc really are not used anymore the fundamentally x86 is Cisc and Power is Risc

Christ, is it too much for someone to post something useful and actually have a clue as to what they are commenting on. Follow the wiki below and you shall have your mostly unbiased answer about 64 bit cpus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

Price on computer hardware always drops, you can get today for hundreds of dollars what you could have a few years for thousands (or not at all.) The top of the line products will always cost a premium though, that's true for everything in life.

Very true Niva, hence why the smart play is to always buy mid-line products.

last time CPU prices were this ridiculous was like in the early 90s. $1000 cpus??? c'mon Intel.

uhh, has some1 considered the fact that core i7 doesn't offer that large of an improvement over core2's? How are ssd sales compared to hdd's? I wouldn't be surprised if they did better from the previous year...

Core i7 is a large improvement over Core 2 the problem is that Core i7 requires a new motherboard and new triple channel memory. Even so the launch of Core i7 brought a DECREASE in price to Core 2 CPU's and most manufacturers (laptop and desktop) are still only shipping product with Core 2. The CPU and GPU sales decline is because people are being content with their machines instead of purchasing new ones. 2009 will be an awful year for the tech market.

Yeah, a large improvement! In price that is.
The I7 920 is $300!! You can almost build a whole system(that is very fast)with AMD parts for that price. A Phenom II is about $200 and it does not need super expensive 3x ram.

My problem is that the i7, often found on sale around $250-280 depending on sales and combos, notably outperforms 45nm counterparts that cost substantially more. I know Intel is just marketing smart. Are you going to pay $350 or a CPU upgrade? Or $280 for a much better CPU, but be forced to buy a new motherboard and memory as well. The only thing helping 45nm processors drop is AMD. Because you can still snag one of their new excellent quad cores for $200 and a motherboard for less than $150 ... oh, and your DDR2 still works in it!!!

I have to agree.... no reason to pay a lot for a extremely beefy processor, when one that is only 100-200 dollars is more than good enough even for high impact gaming, when paired with a good graphics card (which is the more important part of the system, in all honesty!).

ECC parity memory on AMD, not on Intel!,
ECC was a standard 10 years ago, but has left Intel's consumer CPUs,
though remaining in AMD consumer CPUs.
I believe all enterprise CPUs (Xeon, Opteron) use ECC memory,
so why should we consider our home computer toys, not needing ECC memory.
Largely for this reason, I bought two AMD CPUs this month, both
AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core 6000+
which can use the DDR2 ECC memory I purchased.
.
For almost all my computer work, a $100 CPU works well.
Before the last couple years, I would buy $600 and $1100 CPUs.
What I have sought for the last couple years has not been CPU performance,
but CPU/motherboard/memory robutstness..
In my home, I physically replaced the BIOS on one computer,
and saw another computer scramble two separate disk drives possibly because of parity problems arising out of the motherboard's bios,
so the manufacturer issued a bios upgrade.
The robustness of CPU/motherboard/memory is much more difficult to test and talk about than speed, so we hear little about robustness,
but over a year's time many of us experience lack of robustness.
The Debian Linux motto is to make new releases "when it's done", not when the marketing department wants release. Unfortunately, people understandably don't read media unless each issue (whether daily blogs or monthly magazines) has a wealth of information, even when that information greatly diverts attention from what's important.
What we ignore is often more important than what we focus upon -- stop focusing on speed.

What? The i7 920 is not an improvement over the c2d? LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not only does the stock 920 wipe the floor with anything in its price range, if you are an overclocker, this sucker will match or exceed $1000 c2d extreme edition chips.

Now that's a bargain.

i just hope to get more value for my money...not crappy hardware