damocles: I dont have an idealistic view of companies, but charging a 75% premium or more over what it cost them to make it does piss me off a bit. And now that I have a different option I see no reason to continue to give them money unless they demonstrate an unequivocally better product. As long as AMD stays competitive and prices their chips reasonably I will now buy an AMD even if at some point Intel has a slightly better price/performance ratio.. why? Because they never ripped me off. I dont want intel to go down the tubes but I sure would love to see them suffer for a few years. And, yes 6 months is a long time in the computer world but its not like AMD wont have any .13 production, its just going to be 6 months longer before they are completely .13 and part of that is because they will be adding the SIS also at the same time, which intel wont. AMD is also ahead of intel with regards to switching to the copper process. Each company has just been focusing on different technological jumps to complete first...
ToBeMe: Actually as I said in my post the 1.7 is just a rumor and may or may not be true, and likely will not but it is still possible. The 10-15% performance jump with the Palamino is not a rumor at all, the CEO and President of AMD have confirmed it multiple times. The 5.1 sound is definitely going to be a part of at least one Nforce chipset.. I have read that some of the recent news has mentioned that they may make 2 chipsets, one with the 5.1 and one without it, but they definitely will make one with it. The "earliest" reports for the Nforce being out were late July and early August.. and we arent that far off from that still. Those reports also were from rumor sites, Nvidia has never stated a time for the boards to actually be out. I mean, sure, they are delayed.. but whens the last time a piece of hardware hasnt been delayed?