I have to replace my trusty desktop - now 5 years old and faulty.

I want a reasonable maschine for graphics work and gaming using & Win 7 professional.

The spec I fancied is an i5 2.66 with 4 GB DDR3 1333 ram and Radion 5750 Graphics card and mid market motherboard but my supplier is loath to sell it to me due to pin burning issues. A check on the net has shown that there are indeed issues of concern.

He suggests a Core 2 Duo 3.16 with 4 GB DDR2-800 Ram with a high end motherboard and same game card as above which he claims is bullet proof and that I will not notice the difference in speed between the two.

Cost is almost identical.

What would you do - should I shy away from the i7/i5 processors.

I have an Intel Core2 Quad with 4 meg RAM and Nvidia graphics card works very well and is very quick

If you budget will get you an I5 Its gotta be the way to go i reckon.

Isnt the Pin Burning issue related to people overclocking, that possibly dont know what they are doing/pushing it too far?

Core2Duo are still nice, but the I5 will see you further in to the future.

Pin burning was due to extreme overclocking at the design limits of the socket ampage. Also it was limited to certain Foxcon (manufacturer) sockets.

I've got an i5 750 for gaming as the hyper threading of the i7s is unnecessary. The AMD quads are very good too but the low idle power usage of the i5/i7 and the ability to auto ramp up the core speeds on demand was very appealing.

I've got an i7 920 (LGA1366) on an ASUS MB with 6GB or ram and a GTX285 a beast

but when upgraded the i5 and Radion 5***'s whern't out yet

Either CPU will make a decently fast machine, but if I was building a new PC from scratch I would definitely go with the i5. The socket burning is pretty much a none issue if you aren't going mad with over-clocking, and if you are worried you can go for a motherboard with the Lottes socket which has a lower incidence of problems.

Thanks for the feed back guys - have ordered the i5 system - should get it on Thursday.