This page replots several graphs from the extremetech article Intel Quad-Core Performance, Top to Bottom. However, where the original article used a weird type of plot, the plots below are a more sensible x-y plot of benchmark score vs price.
This page is deliberately short on description to avoid knocking off too much of extremetech's hard work, and short on data because I couldn't be bothered to copy it down from the graphs, especially for the artificial benchmarks.
Chart doesn't fit your monitor? Ctrl+scrollwheel in Firefox scales images as well as text.
This slashdot comment by DrDitto points out that i7-compatible motherboards and RAM may cost $370 as opposed to $156 for non-i7 motherboards and ram. These plots take those figures into account:
You want the raw data so you can make your own plots? Well here you go:
CpuCost = [284 562 999 1399 530 316 316 266 266 266 183 193 266] CpuCaption = ['i7 920 ';'i7 940 ';'i7 965 ';'QX9770 ';' Q9650 ';' Q9550 ';' Q9450 ';' Q9400 ';' Q9300 ';' Q6700 ';' Q6600 ';' Q8200 ';' E8600 '] 3ds Max 9 Rendering (Render time seconds, lower better) BenchmarkScore = [430 392 364 489 523 554 587 583 625 619 694 673 888] Lightwave 9 rendering (seconds, lower better) BenchmarkScore = [080 072 066 089 095 100 106 106 113 111 124 122 160] Transcode to MPEG-2 (Seconds, lower better) BenchmarkScore = [89 80 74 81 88 95 99 97 105 103 111 109 97] Photoshop CS4 filter (Seconds, lower better) BenchmarkScore = [24 21.80 20.40 23.10 25.40 26.70 28.80 28.30 30.20 30.20 34.50 32.10 27.80] Games composite score, high resolution and detail (FPS, higher better) BenchmarkScore = [63 65 66 67 63 62 60 60 58 57 56 57 61]