If you are not a cheap ass and can easily afford these high priced parts then why are you complaining? If you want to get technical computer prices are lower than ever and you can certainly get more for your money than ever before. Anyone denying that is a fool.
It used to be that you couldn't even buy a computer for less than $2,000. Now you can get them starting at $299 or so. You can get a decent Dell for office work for $400 with a monitor these days. Hell even laptops are getting cheap. In the late 90's you could not purchase a new laptop for less than $1,200 or so. Gaming computers in the late 90's and prior to around 2003 used to cost around $1,500-$2,500 as I recall. It was much more difficult to build a budget gaming rig than it is now. Today you can actually do it for less than $1,000. You can get a damn nice system for $1,500 and a mega power house for around $2,000. I really don't see any reason for people to be shocked by these prices. The difference is hard drives and memory are cheap, and motherboards, video cards and power supplies seem to take up more of the cost than ever before. CPUs do get expensive, but that's not anything new. They've always been expensive. The difference is now you can actually buy a Intel processor for less than $200 that actually performs great. It used to be that if you didn't have a few hundred bucks in your wallet you were walking out of the store with a Cyrix or AMD processor that was a shit performer and had compatibility problems with alot of software on the market. Today that simply isn't the case. So really the costs have dropped overall but the parts that cost the most have changed and the ones that used to cost a fortune no longer do.
If you don't want to spend $1,000+ on a CPU then don't. No one said you had to buy it and we all know that you can reach the same levels of performance from a lower end processor by overclocking. Hell in case you haven't noticed the processor doesn't even matter that much in a gaming computer. A E6600 performs the same as a X6800 and a QX6850 in games. That's because most games are GPU bound and not CPU bound. The higher end processors are only really needed for video encoding, 3D animation applications and anything involving serious number crunching. (Excel doesn't count BTW.) So stop your whining, you've really got no reason to complain about computer part prices unless your 35 year old virgin living in your mom's basement making $6.50 an hour at Taco Bell and you just can't afford these parts because you aren't motivated enough to do something with your life to break the viscious cycle that confines you to a life of financial misery.
If that's not the case, then please stop. You aren't convincing anyone that your point is valid nor are you contributing anything constructive to the thread. There should be more information about Penryns and Intel processors in general in this thread and less of your bitching.
my friend... i'm 22 and what i make an hour is what your dad makes a month...my donations every month is more than what you and your father make together a month...
you guys can keep bitching at me... but the fact is that not because you have a lot of money means that you will go out and spend $1000+ on 1 single processor that will be old tech after 1 year tops...
that's my whole point, those things are expensive. thats it.