Intel announces high-end CPU price cuts
Intel announced prices for some of its latest, most powerful chips that might disappoint digital gaming enthusiasts because they’re more expensive than reports had speculated. The latest Intel processors for gamers, the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core processors for desktop PCs that run at 3.2GHz will cost US$1,499 each in lots of 1000 processors, with a slightly different version for $1,399. Another version of the chip that runs at 3.0GHz will cost $999 in the same amounts, according to Intel’s latest price list. Gamer blogs and some news reports had speculated the new 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core might come out priced at around $999, far less than Intel actually announced.
Each of the new chips comes with four calculating engines on board for more realistic 3D images and ultra-fast gaming speeds, according to Intel. Several gaming PCs have already been designed around the chip family, including Velocity Micro’s Raptor Signature Edition for around $5,995, which will ship next month and Gateway’s FX541XG for around $2,707.99, which starts shipping this week. The Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core chips had been code-named Bloomfield. A price war with rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) over the past few years has helped push microprocessor prices generally lower. Microprocessors made for laptop PCs have held up better in price because the laptop PC market has been growing at a breakneck pace.
Source: PC World
Comments(47)
bout time
think i gonna stick with my 6400 for now then
I’ll Stick with my 9850be..
Always liked AMD more ^^
Nothing new… same old pattern! AMD ppl are dumb if they didn’t foresee this.
if i was to buy a new cpu today, what’d people recommend? (in uk)
@5
I would wait for the new Nehalem chips to hit in 4-5 months. You’ll get about a 30% performance boost over existing lines of chips out there.
@5 Thom, To be honest it’s all a matter of what you can afford. In theory, the Intel chips are the ones to get, but are more expensive than the AMD’s. You also need to take into account what mainboard you will need with your new processor, if your old board supports your new chip, then you are fine, otherwise take into account the cost of a new mainboard.
I have recently purchased a new mainboard (Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wi-fi), an AMD Phenom 9850 quad processor and a Noctua NH-U9B CPU cooler, all of this came in at around £350 from Novatech in Portsmouth (www.novatech.co.uk).
The performance differance between my old AMD x2 3400 and the Phenom is very noticable, for example, it has cut encoding times using ConvertXtoDVD by half (takes about 15mins to encode a normal size movie).
Nintendo 64 is much cheaper, and it has four players!
If you’ve money to burn then burn away but if not then don’t feel bad because majority of games don’t use quad core. Even dual core is not used all that much yet. Spend the money on a fast dual core or equivalent AMD chip and more memory, better graphics card and so on. You’ll get better value that way!
By the way you can build a decent gaming rig that will play almost all games at high detail and high resolution for around $600 or even less. That’s a complete system! Not just a CPU!
What the hell, you don’t need processors like that for gaming. The GPUs would be the bottleneck even if you had 4 GTX 280.
“processors for gamers”? That’s pathetic.
Here are a couple of links for those that are looking into
building a PC..
http://www.pricewatch.com/
http://www.newegg.com/
http://www.partspc.com/
http://www.ibuypower.com/mall/lobby.htm
@7 Yeah i have (Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe)very good MB..
supports 4 video cards…
Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
EVGA 512-P3-N802-AR GeForce 8800GT Superclocked 512MB
I just wonder if there’s any average to high-end user who could really afford these cpu’s. It cost me 450€ to upgrade my pc a few months ago.
Honestly, I think nobody really needs those cpu’s. You can buy a mid to high end gaming pc that can run everything you want for about 1000€ to 1200€.
Compare that to the prices in this article.
Even if you should be unhappy you can buy a new one a year later.
And even another new one a year later.
And I bet you the third one will be way better than the system offered here for 6000$ (4000€).
And if you add it all up you have not spend more than buying one of those really high end pc’s at the time…
@Goats:
yeah right, try building a PC to play AOC or Crysis on high w/high res for $600. good luck.
An AMD quad core CPU is more than enough for 99.99% of PC users. Why anyone would pay such extreme prices for these Intel CPUs for a marginal performance gain escapes me. The money you save on the AMD CPU will buy one hell of a video card.
@ i356
Can’t you read? “you can build a decent gaming rig that will play almost all games at high detail and high resolution for around $600 or even less”
Goats does not say that you can play everything at high resolution for that price! Besides you could only offer two names that won’t run and so it proves that Goats is right as two games hardly constitute a majority.
Besides, no computer can run Crysis flawlessly at high resolution and high detail, no matter how many top end video cards you can fit in it. Check any test reviews of video cards in SLI and see yourself that Crysis at best is only barely playable at a very high resolution.
Well, for me my 2 year old Core 2 Duo 6400 with 7900GT is more than enough for most games, and with a crappy screen at the moment that can’t really pump out more than 1280 x 1024 resolution, it does the job.
Ahh to be young and care free or alone and without responsibilities…;) Only those that have nothing to do except 24 hr a day gaming really go for all the latest video card, latest processor things. If and when they ever have to support a family, look after a toddler day and night, they’ll see how their gaming time and interest dries up:)
so which one ( amd or intel ) do u think will first come up with more than quad processors.. ..like maye be peta/octa..or what ever..but more than 4 core…and is multi core really that good….why is it just abt 3GHz…i mean hasn’t 3GHz been around for a long time now..shouldn’t we be having cores like atleast 10 time that speed …like 30GHz …?????
Am I missing something? Where is the price cut??? according to this post, the prices are actually HIGHER than speculated…
WTF? please explain… otherwise, misleading(completely backwards) title…
@18: Wrong. Crysis was played, maxed out (everything on very high), at 2560×1600 with 3 gtx 280’s in SLI. Go read Guru3d. They managed to get like 70 fps.
If you want to drop 4 grand to play Crysis, go ahead.
How many giggerbites do these chips need to have to run. i want to build my own system and want the fastest best. and how is the overclocking. like is it run hot. will I need cooling. my last pc has a core two doa and its not that fast and runs hot but I only have one giggerbite of ram do you think that is why. let me know thanks.
@ 22
I call BS. I can play Crysis all settings MAX on my single 8800GTX at 1920×1080 and get 60fps no problem. No need to spend $4,000 at all, I spent about a grand altogether.
Yes I’m glad someone understood my meaning. Around $600 you can get a decent motherboard, dual core CPU – or pay a bit extra for a 8800 quad but really it won’t make much difference, 2Gb memory and PSU and a newish graphics card. Assuming you already have a case and monitor and extra peripherals, but you can get extras very cheap too.
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (or something close to it)
2Gb Memory (does not have to be the most expensive brand!)
Geforce 8800GT (X/S) or similar
Any suitable motherboard (Gigabyte do some good price ones)
PSU + other bits
I guarantee you can make a rig like this for $600-$1000 maybe even less if you shop around or already have parts.
That kind of rig will play, like I said, almost all games at high detail. As mentioned above the one or two games like Crysis you might not be able to run at super high maximum extreme detail and super high resolutions but let’s face it. It’s just another shoot ‘em up that will get boring fast. You can still run it decently with a sub $1,000 system as #24 illustrates.
Really the only people who pay through the nose for cutting edge graphics cards and CPUs have: money to burn, not enough sense, compensating for some small part of their anatomy, makes them feel big to brag about their computer to complete strangers online.. or some combination anyways
I hope this helps some people! Happy gaming
For the person asking about multi core: it’s good if you do a lot of stuff like video editing and other applications or CAD and things like that. Very few games are actually designed to use more than one core. I can probably count on one hand the existing ones which were designed to use multi cores. Quad core will be the same. I would buy a dual core E8xxx instead since the new ones you get more onchip cache per core (which makes more of a difference!) and bang per buck is better.
I bought a QX9770 a while a go and I don’t regret it.
Than again I am extreme rich!
@ azzy
Ahh well I stand corrected, forgot that if you put in a million cards in SLI then you might just play an average game at a good resolution. Too bad that in the real world, the vast majority of people either don’t have the money or don’t have the lack of intelligence to waste thousands upon thousands on a computer just to play one game that can be finished in a few hours anyway. I daresay that Bill Goats’ 600 dollar rig would do 80% of that ludicrously priced test rig anyway.
@ GAMIESTE_POUSTIDES
Too bad that your ‘wealth’ doesn’t extend to ‘wealth’ in grammar.’a go…Than…extreme rich’ indeed.
extremely!
I am typing too fast!
Wow, $1500, that is such a good deal. So, what if you just overclock a $180 q6600 quad to 3.6ghz and outperform a $1500 “extreme” quad?
Well dagger when I bought it, it was even more expensive BUT I use to my home studio with Cubase 4. I have ALL the CPU power I need and I don’t regret it.
My opinion: You must buy what ever you need, when you need it.
Especially in computers. There is no need to wait for the prices to drop.
You need it? for your work or your hobby? Buy it.
I don’t regret for my Cayman S either. It is w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l to drive!
Peace!
26 you are an Idiot. Almost all new games use 2 cores. Its quad cores that most games do not take advantage of.
i’ve had mine since november. totals out to 9.6Ghz.
i like it.
33 you are an idiot calling other people idiots just cause they don’t share your opinion.
35 you are an idiot calling other people idiots who call other people idiots just cause they don’t share your opinion.
RANDOM RESPONSES:
Bloomfields are Nehalem. Wiki: Nehalem And I’m pretty sure these chips are not Bloomfields. Not if they are putting them in 775 boards. Supposed to be a new socket for them.
Crysis will not play on an 8800GTX @ 60fps all high setting with AA on. But will run ~30 on my rig with 4x or 8xQ.(8800GTX E6850 2GB RAM)
DX10 is a big factor as well. 8 series cards on not great for DX10.
You do not need a $1000 processor or quad core for games. Spend your money on the GPU’s. High end SLI is where its at.
You will be lucky to get a Q6600 to 3.6 and will need some serous cooling setup and OC know-how.
The major benefit to the “Extreme” chips is to the hardcore overclocker. You can do some crazy things with the right set-up.
That HP pc is a joke, if your tempted to buy one send me half the money and I’ll give you twice the Gaming PC.
I guess I’m gonna stick with my 486DX2 compy.
#33 prove it. I’ll say again majority of games don’t make much use of multi-cores. The newer ones maybe but still that leaves majority of existing games which don’t.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go drive my Bugatti Veyron to my personal lake, where I can then cruise around with my personal yacht. After that I might drive to the airport and fly my learjet.
Those Intel prices are ridiculous for the consumer market. I’m personally thinking about an AMD 790FX/SB750 motherboard with Phenom 9950BE X4 cpu and ATI HD 4870 gfx card. This will cost me much less than one $999 cpu and I will for sure be able to play any modern game at maxed out settings.
If Intel and NVidia had no competition by AMD, everything would be so ridiculous expensive.
I have a Spectrum ZX with the Zilog Z80 chip.
Is this enough for today’s needs?
Can I run the Latest games?
All this talk about crysis, a game that sucks completely and requires monster rigs to be played in full detail because the game’s coding sucks also. There is nothing on that game in terms of graphics that hasn’t been seen already in games that have much lower requirements!
Forgot to say, 39 bil goats is right. Most games DO NOT use even dual cores, even when they say they do. Do your own testing and notice how only one of the cores is actually working during your gaming while the other is idle.
@41 Yes. Yes it can. But only if you buy the games. Pirate copies won’t work! They must be Genuine Advantage. Because if you don’t have Genuine Advantage then you have Disadvantage. Disadvantage in a game is bad. Why play games if you’re Disadvantaged? Why have a computer if you don’t play games? Why indeed.
@38 486dx2
hehe u made me roll on the ground … is this the same elder brother of 386? i still remember getting first 386 and having 100mb Hdd n i went bragging about it….
well as for upgrades you buy HP Dell n rest brands u pay through ur nose. Assemble one its lot more fun n trust me its damn easy.
as for playing Crysis COD or Assassins creed …. yeah simple dual cores u cant get same FPS with all features n shadows n lights on.
I got presently a AMD X2 4400 n 8600GT…4GB ram … things are fine …. however eyeing a Phenom and a 4850. Surprizing no one mentioned 4850… its beating 8800GT OC handsdown
heck..I am running most games on single-core P4 2.8 Ghz
with 1 Gig Ram and a GeForce 7600 GS ..I couldn’t do Crysis last I checked..but Bioshock ran fine and it kicks Crysis ass lol..rich kids need 1500 dollar CPU’s like bull needs udders lol
@ 35
It’s not an opinion, its FACT you idiot. Here is a list from almost 2 years ago: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/94969-13-dual-core-supported-games, the list of games that support dual core now would be too long to even post. LOL dumba$$