[RallyJon]

I was just looking at the Tom's hardware tests. Using the WinRAR compression test, My old 2.0 Northwood would take 11:27 minutes. My current (yet over two year old) 3.2 Northwood takes 4.36 minutes--an incredible improvement. Even the more recent Pentium D 960 only improves that down to 3:05. Now, finally, these Core 2 Extreme processors can do it in just over 2 minutes.

Still, that doesn't seem like a huge improvement for over two years and costing over $1000! I'll upgrade when there's a processor that's more than twice as fast in real world applications and games, that costs in the bread-and-butter range of $300-500.