Well, just got done...no matter what I did I could not get under 6 seconds on air cooling due to thermal throttling or BSOD/etc. I7's just run so darn hot.
You do have a better cooler than me. I'm running a Zerotherm Zen, it's good but not super. That first run at 4.08ghz was the highest I could get with a arctic freezer pro 7, then I switched to the zen. The FP7 is just easier to install thats why I tried it first.
It's really not a ton of work. Takes about as long to set up as installing any good air cooling heatsink/fan.....as long as you have a case which has the back of the motherboard exposed at the socket area for ease of installing the backplate.
still quite happy with what mine did even if it wasnt over the top, alot faster than the dual core i had before thats for sure. but yea, cant really hold a candle to the intel chips, so oh well
I'd like to game with the 955/965 and see for myself, but they're supposedly as good as intel based rigs. I mean I love to benchmark, but that isn't what we do with our machines 99% of the time. You'd think there'd be some benchs that favor AMD though.
You won't have any bottleneck with a 955 or better quad with gaming. You will have higher CPU usage with a 955 compared to say an I5 760, but still not enough to cause FPS loss really.
Although intel is good/better at gaming, it's other things that intel is better/faster at. Rendering, file compression, encoding, etc.
Why do you think I run mostly I3's and I5 dual cores? Because they aren't a bottleneck in games plus they overclock like crazy so single threaded apps run extremely fast.
I only picked up the I7 870 cuz it was a good deal cheap, $200 shipped.