Hehe well I went to OcUK and picked my order up, hence I got it today.
In a nutshell, YES.
I changed from an Phenom II 940 BE at 3Ghz, I also have a C2D E6600 at 3Ghz to compare to, and I5 is extremely fast, it really is much faster than the C2 in pretty much anything I throw at it, the gap is smaller with the PII, but still enough to make me happy. The idle power consumption is down a lot, the Turbo mode is great, depending on what kind of a load I'm putting on the cpu it just clocks it straight upto 3.2Ghz in the blink of an electron, and when it does that it really is 'very fast' indeed.
I'm very pleased so far, although my fun is being curtailed by having to use Intels stock heatsink-fan unit right now, until I can get the correct fitting for my Noctua (which will likely have to be changed to something else when/if I do get a sff case, due to it's height), the stock cooler is really rubbish, no other way of saying it.
The motherboard it's self is nice, it feels well made, the Bios is very comprehensive, there is a load of stuff I don't even know what to do with yet (I need to do some research) in the overclocking/tweaking section, quite different to what you would see on a Core 2 or AMD platform.
I really like it, it feels like a very well thought out and 'complete' board and cpu, well platform really. I'm using G.Skill Ripjaw memory, which seems to be working a treat, I have no idea how well it handles some overclocking abuse yet as I say, I can't really do it with the stock cooler.
Combined with the fact I also have a G.Skill Falcon SSD in my system it goes like a greasy weasel up a drain-pipe ...that's been chased by a hungry cat
I do recommend. I think it'll knock your Q6600 into the middle of next week when some overclocking is applied. Even without, it'll still be faster.
There are a few good reviews around at the moment, most are linked from
this thread.
