[mtosev]

Originally Posted by AddSub

Hope springs eternal, no?

Seriously though, AMD doesn't have a CPU to truly compete with high end LGA775 stuff much less with i7 stuff. As for i7 980X, I think this one is geared towards serious power-users who get their hands on such CPU's before they hit retail anyways. I'm pretty sure almost every i7 CPU owner will agree, but other than dedicated videophiles, rest of us with i7 setups can't even being to utilize our little i7 920/930 quad's, much less a 6-core monster.

I have a secondary monitor that I use as a resource and hardware monitoring display, and in over a year now I haven't seen all my CPU cores being tasked @ 100% in any situation, other than benchmarking stuff like Prime95/OCCT. Heck, stuff like Crysis makes one or two of my cores hit 35% with spikes into 70% territory and that's it. Everyday poweruser stuff like specialized graphics design apps and similar kick up 2-or-3 cores to 50% and that's where it ends. Standard stuff like browsing, playing music and similar show negligible usage. Even lowest-end i7 CPU's are simply overkill for most tasks today, although if Microsoft continues with their tradition we might need 12-core monsters to run Windows 8.

hmm.... i saw a video on youtube of a guy how he overloaded his i7 and the pc resrated/crashed. trying to find the video