Phenom II 965 seems faster in some games than I7 920

[iamsostupid]

checking newegg combos is standard procedure for long-time neweggheads... it's like do you want to pay extra or not

You should write your own $500 budget gaming pc article for sharkyextreme! It's been missing an article on that for over a year now. For $133 that Athlon II X3 + Asus M4A785-M mobo is a pretty good looking bang for the buck. Especially if that last core could be unlocked.

buyers guides everywhere, published by every site, are terrible. do not even bother reading them. they may get the CPU and chipset right for your purpose, but mostly I find myself disagreeing strongly with the rest of the choices (RAM, power, video, storage) both for reliability and performance reasons as well as recent changes in the market, especially in regard to newegg combos and promos. a buyer's guide could only be 2 weeks old but that is still out of date and you'll probably spend ~$100 extra for the same parts if only you'd been aware of what you needed and where it was marked down, or wost case the buyer's guide was written by a dumbass and completely steered you wrong. there are always peculiarities in everyone's need for a computer, and that is what dictates what the best value is. generally speaking, the Athlon II X3 is the perfect chip, but if I knew I was building something for a veteran overclocker/power user who had assured me that he would never play an RTS game while folding proteins, I would probably say get a i3+gigabyte P55 for ~$220. definitely more expensive than the Athlon II but if you have the desire, a 4.7+ GHz dual core nehalem with HT is possible and faster. In fact the i3 is faster clock-for-clock than the Athlon II X3 - even in some encoding scenarios, so it must be difficult to imagine what an additional 2 GHz would do. Put simply, no Athlon is competitive with that kind of performance per thread. The only thing (as far as overclockers care) AMD has going for them is the low cost. it's basically impossible to mention specific cases at such depth like this in a published buyer's guide, and no one would read them.

the general rule is that the widest CPU will last the longest in a computer because of its execution resources, but for the time being a staggering majority of programs are still not multithreaded and a very high frequency clarkdale is an intriguing interim solution, especially if it's a secondary computer and you already have a high-freq yorkfield or i7. this is all the 32nm we're getting this year so you may as well enjoy it. the funny part is that an intel dual core with HT is pretty much within the margin of error compared to a native AMD quad. except AMD has an absolute top end around 4 GHz and clarkdale's is 5 ghz.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=80&p2=118

your best bet if you want a good machine is to go on the forums here or at anandtech.com and make a thread. tell people what you need and what you do with the computer and just let them debate it until a settlement is reached. the benefit is twofold because they use realtime pricing/promos rather than data from 6 months ago. eventually someone like me or nater or learux chimes in and you wind up with a good build. it's just that nobody does that.