Bought my 980X when it first came out last march it did not cost me anywhere near £1K either more like £830 & as I will use it for 2-3 years on my main PC not concerned with cost as its the same as spending £200-300 each year on a lesser mid range CPU.
Even when the 990X comes out in a few weeks (realworld performance will be identical to the 980X) the 980X will still be just as fast Sandy Bridge is not really a high end CPU at all more a budget mid-range part.
Core i7 based is still the best system even after 3 years to own. Just because people can heavily overclock Sandy Bridge or lower spec Core i7's & get the same results does not suddenly make a 980X a waste of money does it!!! Not everyone wants a water/LN2 cooling based system
980X is really for extreme enthusiasts who want the best & are not bothered about cost. For encoding/decoding & high end PC gaming its still unbeatable & likely to remain so until the LGA2011 + X68 arrives in late 2011 (probably around November) then that will be an upgrade worth buying but even after that in the next 2 years minimum the 980X is still going to be a very capable CPU as software development which uses more than 4 cores is a long way behind the hardware (probably 3-4 years behind!!). This is why Intel drip feed the market with only 2 upgrades per year nowadays as the software is so far behind it would be utterly pointless introducing a new product when its ready to ship I am guessing Intel have probably at least 2 new CPU all ready to go which are just waiting to go into mainstream production but eversince 2006 they have held back the newer parts until the existing have almost sold out as their R&D budget & resource are so large they have no real competition & are a long way ahead of AMD who can only compete with budget range offerings.
If all you do is encode/decode then you should be buying a dual or quad Xeon based system or use a render farm instead!!!!
