This Is Not A Pimp-My-Rig Thread

[Husar]

I'm largely with Furunculus here, the only reason to get a Core i7 is if you plan to upgrade the CPU in the future and want to keep the mainboard etc for many years to come, the Core 2s perform very similar to the i7 in most games and are considerably cheaper.
Graphics cards are where I always get angry, Whacker keeps telling me that NVidia keeps using their bad silicon in them so there is a high chance the thing will fail, however, Whacker is my only source of info for that.
NVidia cards use less energy for the same performance and have the benefit of CUDA and PhysX which are both somewhat new but seem to be coming up and make some games quite a bit nicer or in the case of CUDA make converting videos and other similar tasks much faster than even a Core i7 could.
However it would still be sad if the card then just melts away because of bad silicon.

I'm actually most likely going to buy a new PC this year as well but thought I could just as well wait for the new DX11 generation cards (which will, despite 40nm etc, probably eat even more energy ) and see what I do then once the prices have gone down a bit. Not unlikely that by then the Core i7 are a bit cheaper as well so in general I'm not sure whether right now is a good time to invest into a new rig, you either get something new, possibly buggy(I mean new steppings are introduced for CPUs to improve them , aren't they?) and overpriced or you invest into a platform that's discontinued and you won't get DX11 either.

Another benefit of waiting for three or four months is that you learn how to save money (the economists will be delighted to hear that ) and you will have more money once you actually buy the thing, yet may get it even cheaper which means you will have more money left for, say, a nice 5.1 system to go with it, or to buy a gf from brides.ru or so.

Well, that's my two cents on the matter.