Prices have been released by retailers. Is it just me or these prices seem to be ridiculous?! £176 for the 2500K!! http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-Hardware/All/CPUs-Intel/Intel-Core-i5-Socket-1155
For a first day release and new technology I'd say these are pretty good prices and I can't wait til next week to buy one!
These prices are exactly what they were announced by intel a few weeks back. And if you compare the i5-2500k to an i5-760 and the previous Core2 then they're exactly the same basically for this type of processor.
Given the reviews, performance & most of all amazing power consumption levels, I think most are actually pleasantly surprised by the prices. Very fair I must say. Personally, my jaw dropped a bit at the wattage compared to i7 950 at load, which I was about to get 2 days before the review..
His problem is likely the same as mine, that we've become used to the *current* 1156 pricing - NOT the launch pricing. So it seems like things have gone up, but as Fingers pointed out in another thread, they actually haven't. Saying that, some of you may be used to this kind of money. I've never spent more than £100 on a CPU before. So £176 is always gonna seem like a lot, irrespective of how good value it is.
Pricing has been out for a while though - It's was announced (leaked) sometime ago and have been released bang on those figures. Remember these are the top end of the Sandy Bridge chips, the 2500k and 2600k do not represent the entire range. If a user finds £175 and £260 too expensive for the 2500k and 2600k respectively, then perhaps they will find a performance/price point further down the range. For me the 2500k at that price is too good not to dive in...
I guessed it would be about 170 for the 2500k, the i7 feels a tad over priced, but overall it seems about right
IMHO, Intel could've released it at £250 and it still would've been considered good value. £176 is, quite frankly, amazing value for money. I hope AMD launch something that manages to keep up; Intel seem to be making leaps and bounds compared to them.
They will always add on extra to their top chips because theres a small proportion of people always willing to pay for the best.
At the end of the day these are commodity items so the two biggest factors are 1: supply and demand, and 2: the $ to £ conversion rate. At present the demand is high and there will be a shortage of 2500K on launch, and the $ is as low as it's been for 3mths, hence all prices are increasing apart from DDR3 ram and DVD RW's.
Don't forget the price premium on the motherboards, which brings the total premium of 1155 over 1156 to at least £60. Not enough to dismiss SB outright, but enough to upset my budget calculations. I'm hoping for a bit of a discount by February..
Regardless of whether any one thinks the prices are good, high or low, Intel have no competition so they can pretty much do what they want. It would be great if there was 5 or 6 manufacturers competing on a similar level because it would keep them all honest, but alas we don't have that luxury, so basically we have to accept it , like it or not. But that said from what I have seen in the reviews so far, the sort of performance on some of the CPU's and the prices seem to be pretty good.
I totally agree, but you can still get a fairly decent budget board for £100 (Gigabyte UD3). I'm surprised by the price of the Asus Sabertooth though, the others have been very well priced. Overall prices will go down so if its too expensive for you just sit tight for a few months... *Edit* And what that man said. ^ Pricing isn't too bad considering they haven't even got competition!
I've held on off on a build for two reasons: 1. Unexpected hole eating up about £600 from my budget :s 2. The motherboards don't appeal to me. I was planning to start out on the integrated graphics then step up to SLI As far as I can tell - you can EITHER have internal graphics OR SLI depending the chipset you pick.. but not both. Someone PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.
Question, when will something to upgrade my 1136 cpu come out?? Are those of us with i7 920 cpu's stuck with what we've got?
I'm surprised so many people are thinking of upgrading from Nehalem to Sandy Bridge. Are you really finding your CPUs that slow? I'm not even sure the shrink (Ivy Bridge) will be a worthwhile upgrade when it rolls around in a couple of years, and may wait for the next architecture after that when I can upgrade from a quad-core without HT to an octo-core with HT.
To be frank, if it falls outside of your budget, or you feel it is too expensive, then simply wait and either grab a bargain on eBay, or market place - or wait for the prices to drop, as they always will do. I personally only ever buy to budget, as you will find yourself waiting forever "for that next release" or choose what you want and wait for it to fall into your price range and ignore the new stuff. Or finally - just work that little bit harder, earn that little bit more cash and dont worry about prices! Lets be honest, 2011 is not a year you want to be racking up credit...