Of course, all of this performance and innovation comes at a cost, which is where Core i7 certainly sets itself apart as an enthusiast solution. While a Core i7 920 is reasonably priced all things considered, if you go the whole hog and throw in triple-channel DDR3 memory, and then of course factor in an Intel X58-based motherboard chipset, and you're looking at a pretty hefty outlay compared to either a fast Core 2-based system or even AMD's Phenom II CPU and their Dragon platform. Having said that, a Core i7 920-based system looks a bargain when you put it up against the cost of a Core i7 940 CPU, which ridiculously costs almost twice as much as the 920 despite only offering 10-15% higher performance. Quite simply, it makes little sense beyond acting as a pricing stop-gap between the Core i7 920 and the 965 Extreme Edition, and at the time of writing it simply isn't worth the money compared to the Core i7 920.

In short then, if you're looking for top-notch performance then our benchmarking numbers say it all really - Core i7 is the place to be. Beyond such generalisations, how much benefit you'll see from the move to Core i7 from Core 2 depends upon the tasks you set it - While gaming in GPU limited scenarios is never going to be particularly helped by CPU upgrades, and some other disciplines don't particularly benefit from Nehalem's architecture, many other common tasks from extracting archives through to video encoding see vast gains from Core i7 and the general impression when you look at the whole is that Core i7 is simply a pretty major step up in performance terms no matter how you look at it. Yes, its performance comes at a premium, and the Core i7 940 isn't worth considering, but Intel's Core i7 920 is undoubtedly up there as a fantastically tempting proposition for any enthusiast right now.