Q9450 is out!

Well slap me silly and call me Susan. The Q9450 actually showed up. We'll be obtaining them from Tiger Direct for the time being - hopefully we'll find a less expensive supplier before too long, but for now the chip will add $150 to the base Reactor price. It's worth it, in my humble opinion. (Hey, I must be the first blogger in years to actually spell that phrase out.)

To remind those of you who forgot, this is the chip that will finally prove a worthy successor to the Q6600 - something the Q9300 really wasn't. Here's a brief comparison of Humanity's quad-core options:



As you can see, the Q6700 is so cheap now, it blows the brand-new Q9300 away, and even the Q6600 is arguably a better choice, with a comparable speed and a higher cache. But the 65nm chips (Q6600 & Q6700) are looking a bit long in the tooth, and we'd much rather be selling PCs with current-generation hardware.

The QX9650 fits that bill (and many of them will do 4GHz, which is incredible for a quad at this point) but they are so very expensive. That makes the Q9450 our sweet spot quad, and the one we've been waiting for more than any other 45nm chip. The Q9550 will eventually outperform it, but by a small margin for about 57% more, so this is, in our opinion, the most exciting chip to come out of the new 45nm line.

And we're happy to finally be able to change our stance on quad-core gaming PCs - the time to buy is NOW!