Indeed, it's actually my office machine - the graphics card isn't even worth mentioning. Very nice for sofware development. Although the benefits (to build times) actually dwindle to about zero at around 16 processes - 2 x Xeon 4 cores would probably give about the same real-world performance. Was a bit of an experiment to see how far we could/should go - our development machines are getting a tad rusty.

At home I am still squeezing the last ounce out of a 5+ year old Core 2 Duo.

*** thinking of my office computer, barely able to cope with Ms Visio and Ms Project server, crappy celeron with as little ram as possible as RAM is sooo expensive ***

I think an i7 CPU's parallel processing power is wasted on games. You would not be likely to be able to perceive any appreciable difference in performance versus an i5, also taking into account the slightly faster Ghz speed of the i7 chips versus the i5s.

You would be far better off saving money and going with the i5 and then investing the funds into the best possible GPU you can afford to give this system build some longevity before it needs upgrading again, not to mention an awesome experience gaming.

Does it still use DDR1? As DDR2 became twice as cheap when it was released and now DDR3 is cheaper than DDR2, at least where I've checked (US and Sweden).

Its weird how DDR3 seems to have always been cheaper then DDR2 for some reason...

Well I made an official decision. I just got the i5-3570k and picked out a motherboard for it. Next is finding a computer case.

No, It's just my employer having deep pockets and short arms and being extremely shortsighted as well... The time I waste every month because of that is probably worth more than the amount they saved on a decent processor and 4 gbs of ram, but a purchaser, somewhere probably got a nice performance assessment because he cut purchases costs by 10% or so ...

Now that the Intel "Haswell" CPU's are out. Is anyone getting them in the near future?