Ok people of either gender, It's that time again

[Detale]

Well Im going to make the leap. I have $650 to spend and I wanna I7. i know I should wait but well, you know me. Obviously Im getting the

Intel Core i7 920 $275

And the ram that fits the budget is

CORSAIR XMS3 DHX 4GB $104

Now I know its only 4GB and I may play with the numbers a bit to get these in steadG.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) for $135

Here's the thing I dont know about the motherboards too much. So price is my biggest deal and i'd like to know I can push the ram to 2000 if need be as the above are 1600's. Should this even be a concern or now?

I think Im going with this GB board
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R $199

But I am not sure if I should spend the extra green on this DFI one
DFI LANPARTY JR X58-T3H6 $229

or even maybe this one
MSI X58 Pro LGA $199

I dont think Ive ever owned a MSI board before, but again it fits the budget. Any specs you think are better by all means post em. Im not up on the latest i7 literature at all so Im a bit out of the loop since they hit the streets. Thanks guys so much

[Skiz]

What about the Phenom II? I recently read that just set some clocking records.

How does it compare to the I7?

[Artemis]

The MSI boards are as well designed as Gigabyte, in fact in terms of reliability I rate MSI above Gigabyte (although GB have improved), so it really is a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other. My personal preference out of the two would be MSI.

[LubTheStaringCat]

I must admit I like the different colour's of the DFI LANPARTY JR X58
but I just wouldn't go by the colour.

[clocker]

Why are you doing this?

[apextwin146]

If i remember correctly he said he changes his rig every 6 months .. I dunno y though?

[IdolEyes787]

If i remember correctly he said he changes his rig every 6 months ..

I thought about putting something like "as snake sheds his skin" but I won't.

[clocker]

Your restraint is admirable.

The three i7 systems I've seen have all been disappointments.
My q9550 beats them at SuperPi by 2 seconds (at stock speeds) and the OCed Wolfie by even more.
Which is of course, meaningless but kind of surprising anyway.
I couldn't find any common day-to-day metric that demonstrated the new platform's superiority in a way that made it "must-have" or even "oooh, shiny!".

Exclude the chip, and the p45 chipset with 8GB of RAM can be had for @$225 which IMO, is the bang/buck winner at the moment.

Besides, Intel announced that they're speeding production of the new 32nm CPUs- basically shortcutting the i7 range- so I think the i7's will be the s754 of the Intel range- here today, gone tomorrow.

[Cabalo]

agreed with clocker on this one. especially with the Socket754 analogy.
It's clear this i7 platform is a transitory one.
I would wait a bit longer and go for the PhenomII if they live up to the hype. I'm expecting AMD to be back in the game.

[Detale]

Hmmmmm. Thanks for the input guys. I didn't know alot of this. LOL yeah I do tend to redo my rig around every 6 months or so. Bit of a HW whore I guess. Maybe I'll hold off a bit more.

Clocker which p45 board and 8 gig or ram do you see for that price?

Maybe I'll just get a q9550 and play with that for a while then.

One other thing. Could someone please tell me the difference between these two video cards, I cant seem to find it
EVGA 896-P3-1255-A1

and

EVGA 896-P3-1255-AR

It's only a $5 difference in price but why the AR and the A1?? Oh BTW I'm going for a new GTX card as well