Even though already available for quite some time now (read a week or so), Intel decided to officially launch the successor to the Core2Duo platform which was the start of their way back to the gaming platform top.

Thing is, although the Core i7 really trashes the competition and its own predecessors in desktop applications, raw processing power, consumption and heat generation not everything is a landslide win.

Techspot's benchmarks, which have never let me down before, show that there are only big differences in game benchmarks when playing on low quality settings. In high quality settings, the Core i7 920, the lowest priced processors that is available right now in the high end segment, is beaten by current Core2Duo processors. Because of the major win in lower quality settings one might blame the GPU for causing a bottleneck but i'm sure there is room for improvement there without needing to dish out an additional €500 for a kick ass graphics card too.

These are the European target prices from a local distributor (so you might want to add some additional Euro's to that):

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