Two Questions

[DeanEH]

Would it be much of a change to go from a i7-860 to one of the new Sandy Bridges? Is it worth an extra hundred dollars for the 2600K instead of the 2500K?

 

[aphexcoil]

2600k has hyper-threading enabled, a slightly larger turbo setting and 8 megs of cache instead of 6 megs of cache on the 2500k.

The PCmark score for the 2500k is around 7,000, while the 2600k score is around 10,000.

 

[limitedaccess]

It depends on what you are using it for. The 2600k gets significant performance improvements in certain applications, most notably rendering, encoding, and folding.