Fairly cheap for an INTEL yes.... if you want the more expensive brand, intel is the best choice. AMD is best bang for your buck. I spent $300 on my AMD AM3 565 3.4 DUAL CORE which is OC'd currently to 3.8, and my MSI 870 Fuzion board unlocked the other 4 cores making it a 3.8 QUAD CORE pushing 4 gb of 1600 DDR3 ram.... you bought a processor.... a nice processor but just the processor... I built my tower complete with 2 TB of hard drives and a GTS 250 GPU for right at a grand and I over paid on alot of it. For that in intel you would almost double it. The comparing intel board and CPU is 3xs what i got my AMD for, and they'll both pushout the same FPS on the games I play so I will save my money and keep on with my AMD pos
I love Alienwares, like I love Ferrari's. The are beautiful, elegant, and breath taking machines... but for alot less I can get the Asus G53JW series Laptop and be just as happy... again with my best bang for your buck.
Not arguing best overall... just not in the financial setup to where I can just blow money away because I have to the best most expensive thing. I can get by with something thats cheaper that will get me almost the same results. In all reality you will not be using a computer enough within the next 3-4 yrs to have to have more than 4gbs of ram if you get DDR3 1333s or better, multitasking in Linux or Win7 is prioritized well enough you just wont need it 90% of the time. And like stated earlier, 6 cores are basically just for "say so", you barely use the 4th core much less 5 or 6 so why. 90% of the time I dont even utilize 100% of 1 and 2 much less 3 or 4![]()