Badas>If you are a renderer or do any type of video encoding work then the i7 platform will benefit you most of all compared to the gamer.
That's not to say there will be not a perfromance increase in game but that depends on the game if it has been coded to make use of it. If all you want to do is play Streetfighter and resi evil 5 games while their is a slight increase in performance it is not noticeable unless you benchmark it or run fraps. And seeming as the framerates were high in the first place it hard to justify that kind of outlay for it.
But if you play other type of games say like RTS games then it can prove worthwhile as typically they usually use more cores than say straightforward shooters or what not. Games like Medieval 2 total war 2 or the supreme commander series, company of heroes etc then performance is increased. But like I said it varies from game to game.
But the advantages of i7 over my 9550 were more profound when I used it for application work such as video conversion etc. I have only just started to get into it and basically learning the ropes so to speak. Whether I continue with it is a different story. This is where the i7 shines over my 9550.
I would suspect the same would be true of 3d rendering but cannot say for sure as a)I am terrible at it and b)I have about as much artistic flair as a person who has zero ability in this department.
I have my 9550 clocked at 4ghz I would probably go higher if I hadn't reached the FSB limit of my motherboard and when I tested it against my i7 at stock for games then the performance IIRC I think the i7 was faster by about a few frame or so. But once I started to overclock the i7 then it pulled away.
Do you have that cinebench benchmark? Here is a very very rough baseline comparison and you can try it for yourself if you download it.
It takes my 9550 50 seconds to render the scene using the multiprocessor rendering.It takes my i7 39 seconds.There are plenty of members here who have even more faster setups who could render it quicker. While this is a synthetic benchmark and in no way correlates to the performance of 3dsmax between your 9550 and proposed i7 setup there is a performace increase from an i7 thanks to it 4 cores and 4 hyperthreading cores compared to the 9550 4 cores.
To answer your question of do I think it was worth it. It's difficult to answer this question look around the forum and you will see all sorts of setups with what I would at least call overkill specs. You see people running crossfire and sli setups using 285's or 5870's and then running it on 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 monitors. Ask them if it was worth it and they will give you all sorts of reason to justify it. At the end of the day you can justify anything if you want to. Same case here. I mainly play games. I don't render, Only just started to get into the video side of things. Basically the 9550 setup I have could have done the job maybe a bit slower but still worthy of being used. I just fancy a tinker about with a new setup that's all.
As for the H50 debate. I am not convinced of it on the i7 platform but that's just my own personal experience while there are other members here who could tell you differently. As to why I just don't get the same cooling ability that other members have achieved, honestly I don't know.
Maybe I have a hot running chip, Maybe I have seated it wrong, wrong application of paste and many other number of reason I could come up with but at the end of the day my less than satisfactory performance of the h50 cooler should not detract you. One thing is for sure though it can't be as bad as the stock cooler.
The other night when I quickly stuck that on for giggles it hit 100c under linx testing. And in that cold spell we were having I had to open the windows as I was literally roasting in my seat.
I saw your post in the other thread but decided to answer you here as not to go off topic. I wish you the very best on whatever you decide and wish you a happy new year.
