Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: October '09

If you don't have the time to research the benchmarks, or if you don't feel confident enough in your ability to pick the right processor for your next gaming machine, fear not. Tom's Hardware has come to your aid with a simple list of the best gaming CPUs offered for the money.

[Pandamobile]

i7 920 represent.

[Major_Tom]

I hope the i7 920 drops in price relatively soon, $250 price point would be more than generous.

[zagibu]

You should opt for an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition instead, triple channel ram and higher mainboard prices seriously hurt i7 920's price/performance ratio.

[Pandamobile]

It's only at what, $279.99 right now, isn't it?

[Major_Tom]

BestDirect.ca
BC
Intel Core i7 920 Quad Core Processor LGA1366 2.66GHZ Bloomfield 8MB LGA1366 4.8GT/S (BX80601920)
$309.79 In Stock

I'm Canadian.

[Pandamobile]

Oh. So am I. I got mine when they were still $360.

These things overclock so easily. I've been running 3.6 GHz for a couple months now. 4 GHz was a little scary, but still feasible.

It's awesome for multimedia stuff. Renders 720p footage from Sony Vegas 6-8x faster than my Althon X2 6400.

[Major_Tom]

Intel is generally preferred for Multi-Media.

[Pandamobile]

Yeah, if I was going for strictly a gaming PC, I would have grabbed a Phenom II 955.

But I work with Maya, and Photoshop on a daily basis at school so the 4 cores and 8 threads certainly help.

[Scenarist]

same here dude , my i7920 @ 3.6 is a MONSTER ... and i do photoshop , maya , 3ds max x64bits ...huge difference over my last system ...

I never dreamed of doing animations in 3d because frame by frame renders were 24+hours of rendertime for 30 second clip of a relatively small scene and low poly's .....its the raytracing that kills it ...

but NOW I render what ever i want to render

[shazui123]

theyre never utilised well by pc devs :(
feels a bit wasted really

[Tarasque]

Do you 2 guys need a room? Or maybe you would like to move it to IRC? I understand nobody cares abput PC articles but you have alot more posts to go in this article to even get it to 100%.

[Major_Tom]

Haha my bad caveman and you don't get very many degrees through posts.

@ Panda

You forgot to add , "Aww shucks, Yuk yuk!"

[Pandamobile]

"Hey guys, I don't understand the first thing about computers so I'm just gonna come in here and say that these articles don't matter and I'm a complete tool. Okay bye. Aww shucks, Yuk yuk!"

[Tarasque]

"Hey guys check this out."

Ewwww what is that.

"Its from the browsing history of Pandamobile."

What site is that from.

"The URL is www.dirtysanchez.com"

AWW SHUCKS, YUK YUK.

[Pandamobile]

You tried to be funny, and failed pretty hard. Good try though. Better luck next time.

[Highatus]

Guess i should have held off a while longer for an i7.

i rebuilt my rig this spring and have the Quad Core 2 Q9400. I like it but i wanted the i7 more at the time...but was priced at 600 >.<

[il-mouzer]

just recently bought the i7 920 with all the shizzle and wizzle

costed me €230, from OCUK :)