Should I wait to buy a i7 Processor?

Question

I'm looking at building a system, and one thing I've noticed is the i7 hasnt had a price drop in quite some time. With the arrival of the Lynnfield processor coming up shortly should I wait it out a little bit longer before making the purchase?

EDIT: Not using it for gaming but I am a programmer.

Answer 1

As a programmer, you're looking for three features in a processor

• multiple cores (4 being better than 2)
• virtualization support
• x64 to address more than 3.5gb of RAM

Unless you're working with massive codebases, the marginal performance you get from a core i7 will NOT make any noticeable difference.

What you will need, however, is something that can handle lots of concurrent tasks, while utilizing a sizeable amount of memory.

You will also need to run several virtualized environments to run/test your code in. Personally i have 2 different XP, 3 linux, 1 vista, 1 windows 2003, and 1 windows 2008 environments all setup under virtualbox on my programming workstation. At any given time i can have 2-3 of these running concurrently, making a quad core CPU a necessity. With most virtualization suites you can set specific VMs to run on a single core.

That said, your run of the mill Core2Quad and AMD Phenom X4s CPUs will do the job JUST FINE, and save you a ton of cash over the core i7. Motherboards are cheaper for these CPUs, and you're not tied to pricier DDR3 memory to boot (no pun intended).

In short. SAVE YOUR CASH.

Answer 2

I have always used a rule of thumb of 100$ per hardware part but you could make your rule up as you want ... It mostly depend of your needs but if I where you I should go slowly ...

Answer 3

there's only one reason to get an i7,which is gaming

will you be using it for gaming?