I7 920 OR AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition

[dex_Bn]

Is the i7 worth the increased price tag, not only on the processor itself, but also on the required motherboard?

I'm not so much limited by budget, however I do not want to pay nearly double the price for something that is only going to yield marginally better performance?

 

[mfarrukh]

i7 920 is worth every single penny
Go around the web and you won't find a single website not recommending i7 920
Intel's Core i7 has proven itself to be the most powerful gaming CPU option available, based on the data we have gathered. The Core i7-920 is a great choice for systems coupled with multiple graphics cards in an SLI or CrossFire configuration.

The motherboards and DDR3 RAM that the i7 architecture requires will bring the total platform cost higher than other systems, but the resulting performance should be worth the purchase price.

While the Core i5 performs similarly, there are a few applications and games that can take advantage of the Core i7 900-series' Hyper-Threading and triple-channel memory features, so spending the extra money on the Core i7-920 can pay off, particularly if you plan to overclock.

In addition, LGA 1156-based Core i5 and Core i7 processors are limited to 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes, but the LGA 1366-based Core i7-900s do not share this limitation, since they get their PCI Express connectivity from the X58 chipset. This makes the LGA 1366 Core i7 processors a good choice for CrossFire or SLI configurations with more than two graphics cards.

 

[jennyh]

Simple rule for determining if an i7 is worth the extra :-

If you using it for any maths intensive work, rendering, encoding etc and will be doing a lot of this most times you use the pc, then yes it's worth it.

 

[dex_Bn]

Best answer selected by Dex_BN.

 

[Cryslayer80]

If that is the best answer... Play on...

 

[werxen]

Yeah good answer except you fail to mention

1) there are in fact ZERO games that use hyperthreading
2) the cost is going to be much higher than the p2
3) future upgrade paths are going to cost a lot more $$$$