@tonytheterrible"i7 does everything in half the time of the Phenom II 965"Half the time vs 3x the price is no contest for me.Plus if you use the money you saved on the processor and motherboard, to buy twice as much memory and a SSD hard drive, your system will probably be faster when it comes to everyday tasks. No doubt, if you're routinely compressing video or creating large vector images or any other cpu intensive project you'd probably be better off with an i7.If you're doing school projects, surfing the web, checking e-mail, watching streaming video, playing games, listening to music or watching dvds you really can't go wrong with the MUCH cheaper Phenom II/