I'm running my i5 @ 4.5ghz

And it's been under full load for about 30 minutes now. 55*c
Not too shabby I think. >.>

Care to explain what's so shabby about the i3, i5, and i7?

Not instigating at all, just really curious.

The Sandy Bridge architecture that the current generation of the i series uses is extremely efficient and stable. A dual core i3 with hyperthreading pretty easy beats most quad cores on gaming and such, and per core is very powerful. The i5 is in the middle, 4 cores, but no hyper threading. I'm running mine stable and cool almost a full ghz stable and cool on a $30 cpu cooler. People with better setups can pretty easily get them to 5ghz, and even at lower clocks it pretty handily destroys everything AMD puts out, and even competes with the last gen $1000 cpus by intel. i7's have hyperthreading and come in 4 and 6 core varieties. They are pretty much the jesus chip at this point.