More for less
A couple of months ago HEXUS reported the rumour that Intel was going to halve the price of the Core i7 950 on 29 August. Judging by the pre-order opportunity shown in the Overclockers screen grab below, that is exactly what's going to happen.
To be honest, this move is long overdue. Intel has had the 3.06GHz 950 priced at exactly the same level - $562 - as the 3.20GHz 960 for a while now. Why would anyone willingly forgo 140MHz of clock speed for no saving? There's also the 930, much cheaper at $294 on Intel's price list but only a bit slower at 2.80GHz.
Intel nearly always changes its published price list on a Sunday, so the 29th tallies with that, and Overclockers has chosen to jump the gun a tad by putting the new price up for pre-order with an ETA of 30 August. At time of writing none of Scan, Misco or Ebuyer were offering the 950 at this lower price.
It's been a month and a half since the last Intel CPU price list refresh and the chip giant will want to be positioning itself aggressively for the run-in to Christmas, so we wouldn't be surprised to see some other juicy price cuts, especially considering the buzz AMD is generating around its Fusion cores.
The 950 price move would render the 930 obsolete and, for that matter the 920, 880, 875K, 870 and 860 too. Assuming it drops to $281, the only real choices for the next price bracket down would appear to be the Core i5 760 - four cores, four threads and 2.80GHz for $205 - or the Core i5 650 - two cores, four threads and 3.20GHz for $176.
