Originally posted by: ExarKun333
Originally posted by: Idontcare
Originally posted by: zerogear
Originally posted by: GundamF91
The fact is that economy is bad, and having fast computer is discretionary. For most people, they just want to surf the net and use MS Office. Even AMD XP and Intel P4 were more than enough for that.
And the fact that I don't think most consumers care about 15 min video encoding shrinked down to 7 minutes. I encode video too, but honestly, I just queue it up for the night and let it churn it through, that extra 8 minute is not going to make me spend another 900$ to upgrade my Quad.
Performance-wise, it is quite awesome, but the performance gains (real-life) is little to nothing.
I hit that limit as well. Even for stuff that takes hours, just let it run overnight. Provided it is done before I get back to the computer the next day I don't care whether it finished at 1AM or 7AM. I'm not buying a faster CPU until doing so is reasonably assured to improve my quality of life in some fashion. I foresee my next computer dollars going to SSD long before CPU or ram.
I am not sure I agree 100%; I would much rather spend $400-500 on a CPU/MB combo for an i7 build and know that I have a great foundation for a computer in the long run (a couple years). Buying a $400-500 worth of SSD's will be a waste as in 6 months they will be worth less than half that with likely significantly faster and bigger drives available. Many people said the same thing about those who picked up the QX9650 when it came out almost a year and a half ago...it is STILL an amazing processor and was worth it for many people.
If the price of SSD's doesn't bother someone, then I really doubt the fact they spent an extra $100 on a MB and an extra $50-75 on RAM is going to really bother them. With that said, I don't know if a i7 make sense for someone with a good quad setup, but if you are looking to move up from an older machine, it makes a lot of sense.