Holy Price Drop! Q9550...

We always felt the Q9550 would have been our first choice for the Reactor's entry-level quad-core CPU, but it was introduced an unreasonably high price of $530. Well, we apparently weren't alone, since the price has now dropped to around $330, indicating pretty clearly that sales of this excellent chip haven't been bringing in too many bonus Hawaii trips for the Quad-Core product manager at Intel. That lodges the Q9550 at a mere $5 above the Q9450 we've been so happy with thus far. The 9550 only sports .1GHz more in CPU speed, but the real payoff is the 8.5x multiplier, vs. the 9450's 8x. That should allow us to offer a significantly higher overclock on the Reactor for the same price. We'll post some results after we've had a chance to run through a few of them...