What justifies the price difference between i7 920/940?

[jimmyj68]

I said I was through upgrading but just thought I'd look around at stuff that's new. Three i7 chips available - the untouchable for me i7 965--the 940 at around $570 and the 920 at around $289. Why is the 940 almost twice the cost of the 920 (I know - 40 is twice 20)

Maybe I'm supposed to know this but I have no clue!!!

 

[mpilchfamily]

There are several factors that could be at play here. Course the 940 will be priced higher then the 920 since its a faster chip. But whats likely causing the gap is the number of availible CPUs. I'm sure they are producing more of the 920's then the 940's making the 940's go for a higher price.

 

[DaveSimmons]

intel has almost always charged a huge premium for the fastest CPUs, sometimes double the price for the last 10% speed jump.

nvidia's $500-600 single-GPU graphics cards were usually not twice as fast as the $300 cards either.

Lack of competition at the high end from AMD is a huge factor in pricing -- if AMD has no matching high-end chip then intel can charge almost whatever it wants.

 

[Mwing]

and ppl afraid to overclock will buy it since it is faster

 

[nomunk]

Originally posted by: Mwing
and ppl afraid to overclock will buy it since it is faster

lol ur right i'm a noob when it comes to overclocking so when the i7 940 goes down in price i'm going to upgrade to that CPU next and sell my i7 920

 

[Davegod]

supply, demand and marketing.

940 will have lower yields than 920. Therefore lower supply.
940 is faster than 920. Therefore at equal price levels, higher demand.
That alone can account for a chunk of price difference, depends on the elasticity of demand (think of a chart, depends on how steep the slopes are). If there's lots of people with more money than sense / get lots of utility (benefit) from having the fastest chip at any price then demand is inelastic and intel can charge high price.

This leads us to market segmentation - Intel can get big margin on the 940 while scooping lower margins but bigger market for the 920.

This leads us to pure marketing - higher price for 940 makes 920 look like a bigger bargain

 

[Blain]

Many people would say even the 920 can't be justified.
Justification of worth is totally in the eye of the buyer/user.

 

[GLeeM]

The speed difference justifies the price. Corporations don't overclock, so if someone needs a faster CPU they buy the 940.

You and I would just buy the 920 (2.66) and OC it the tiny bit (2.93) to make it the same as a 940. Or even a little more (3.2) to make it like a $1,000 965.

From what I've read you could OC the 920 to the level of 940 very easily and even with the stock heatsink. I think I read that someone even lowered the volts to save on heat and electricity.

 

[jimmyj68]

Sorry to take so long getting back and thanking those who chimed in - my wife's 8 year old "C" drive kicked the bucket in the middle of her composing an e-mail. You know the drill - after going through the necessary steps to determine that in fact her hard drive died - it then took the required time to assure her "are you sures?". Finally today I reluctantly went to Walmart where I paid a hefty premium for a WD Caviar GP 500 gig new drive. They had the gall to ask $100 bucks for a drive I could get from the Egg for $70 bucks with free shipping. Ah well. Wifey does run a home family services business and has tons of files about her clients. Me? I retired in 1999:wine:

Now I have another sticky wicket ahead - she had used an external backup I threw together for her and backed up using Windows One care. All other machines in the house are Vista - she was old school and stuck with XP. Can't retrieve her data from the backup without using One Care since One Care backed it up - also think can't recover files concocted in XP to a vista machine- is that right??? So now in in the middle of trying to get her puter purring again after reinstalling win xp with sp1. Windows one care won't talk to it. So go through the hassle of upgrading to win xp sp2 and then the latest sp3 - see if One care will talk to that. Then convince one care to retrieve her files - of course there is no place for her documents to go until we reinstall wordperfect/microsoft word both of which she had on her system in the ancient versions - so it goes on and on - If I could just get her to step into the 21st century

 

[daw123]

Remember that the 940 (C0 stepping, 2.93GHz stock) is due to be replaced by the 950 (D0 stepping, 3.06GHz stock) at the end of this month.

Therefore, the performance difference between the 920 and 950 will increase by 133MHz because the 920 is not changing stock speed, although it will be D0 stepping.

It also looks as if the price of the 950 will remain the same as the older 940 (roughly $570)