Perhaps the biggest problem we saw with these motherboards was their price, both situated above $250, they were far from affordable. Add to that the serious price premium for DDR3 memory, and you ended up with a relatively affordable and fast Core i7 920 processor that nevertheless needed to run on an expensive platform.

Today DDR3 prices have dropped dramatically. It is now possible to purchase a 3GB triple-channel kit for as little as $50, or a 6GB kit that start at around $80. The recent drop in DDR3 pricing got us thinking about the affordability of the Core i7 platform, and we began to wonder just how cheap users could build one of these systems.