Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Thank God for AMD getting themselves back in the game. The i7 lineup has been somewhat "meh" for years, and in my opinion the i5, overclocked, has been the best option for gaming. But AMD putting pressure on Intel has now given us two more physical cores on the i7, and this is an excellent device. I'm not an overclocker, so I didn't get the K version, but the 8700 is a great device. It runs noticeably cooler than the 7700 in a friends PC (the transistor pitch is bigger on the 8700, making it's thermal characteristics better, but it's on a bigger die). I play a lot of simulations, where the processor is generally the bottleneck (it doesn't matter how fast your graphics board is, if the processor can't calculate the physics fast enough, you're frame rate will drop), but this brute forces it's way through. I'm extremely impressed with this.