I would love to see a task manager screenshot during the different multi-threaded benchmarks, also games, so we can see how it utilizes the six cores and two threads per core?

The INTEL i7 980X has dual QPI's and will run in a dual socket mainboard!!!

Such as the EVGA W555 / Classified SR-2

This has got to be THE most worthless, useless, expensive pice of silicon I've ever seen. An average of 13% performance increase in SOME apps AND a decrease in gaming?

Give me that 1k, and I'll get myself a GTX480, an SSD, and some DDR3 modules that will give me 2x, 3x or Xx times more performance in EVERYDAY use.

Thank goodness for CUDA, Stream, OpenCL and all that cr4p.

Now that's what I'm saving some money for.

I'm somewhat confused as to why, on your review, the PII X4 965 seems rather greedy, but on Toms' review of the i7-980X, AMD's offering does much better.

Toms' test setups for the X58:
Gigabyte X58A-UD5 (LGA 1366) X58 Express, BIOS F4
Corsair 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20 @ DDR3-1333

Yours:
Intel DX58SO (Intel X58)
I'm going to presume Corsair DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20)

Toms' test setup for AM3:
Asus M4A79T Deluxe (Socket AM3) 790FX/SB750, BIOS 2304
Corsair 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20 @ DDR3-1333

Yours:
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-UD5P (AMD 790FX)
I'm going to presume Corsair DDR3-1333 2 x 2GB (7-7-7-20)

Toms' has the PII X4 965 idling 21W lower than the 980X and 32W lower at load (using Prime95), however you have the 965 idling 10W HIGHER and using 4W more at load. Is Prime95 just favouring AMD or is there some sort of problem with your 790 rig? I will concede that the AMD rig will be using less RAM on the Toms' setup which may account for some of the difference.

One thing to note: up the resolution on a CPU-limited title such as Left4Dead and the performance gap narrows markedly. Enable AA and there's no difference at all. For graphically intensive games and/or highest settings, it won't make sense to fork out $1000 no matter how good the CPU.

It'd be nice to see how good this CPU is with multiple graphics cards... :)