I have seen the list of hardware fitseries3 has had over the past 3 years and he is not lying about having it all. Concerting the thermal problem you say i7 is having, that blame should be placed more the lack of cooling options made for the chip. Also all the companies that have released, or are planning to release a mounting kit for the LGA1366 socket may not be sufficient. My Coolermaster Hyper 212 that I use with my i7 chip produces temps that are only about 1c lower at idle and maybe a max of 5c underload. The cooling technology, other than maybe water and deffinately extreme, in of itself is old. I do agree with fitseries in that spending that much on a CPU alone when you might not be able to get 4.5GHz with your cooling, and deffinately not be able to achive that for daily use, then it is money wasted. If your rig is mainly for gaming that getting a quad core CPU is pointless in of itself since no games yet are coded for more than 2 threads.