Sure $284 sounds good for a CPU, you also have to consider how much the memory will cost and how much the motherboard will cost. DDR3 memory is not cheap and the X58 chipset is not cheap. With the economy sucking the way it is, I'm going to pass on the Core i7 right now.

The 2GB/s bus between the X58IOH and the ICH10 is looking a bit of a bottleneck to me, given it supports 3GB/s SATA, not to mention any PCI Express, USB and Gigabit ethernet transfers which might also be occurring.

In practice few machines can come close saturating an internal bus due to ethernet traffic or SATA disk traffic, unless the traffic is compoetely generated in the CPU without reference to external machines or the inrternal disks.

No disks in existence can actually do 3Gb/s, that's just a rating on the SATA bus. Even a six disk RAID5 array on a 3Ware 9650 8 disk controller tops out around 150MB/s read speed IME.

Now that PCIe thing is a problem with multiple x16 video cards... is there an error in the description of where the PCIe bus hangs off the rest of the system or is the 2GB/s incorrect?

I just had to ask. It is an old joke, but I still like it.

BTW, I bet it will run it FAST.

Mine is the one with tomatoes stains in the back.

4K for a 386Dx in 1987 , I woulda taken this deal .{ of course this included a $400 vid card ]