The Internet and e-mail can be great time-savers and productivity tools, but at some point, there’s a cost to “information overload.”

And it ain’t cheap.

A New York based research firm recently tried to quantify the cost of info overload at chipmaking giant Intel Corp., which has major operations in the Phoenix area.

The tally: Intel workers are losing approximately eight hours per week due to information overload, an amount that for a company its size, would result in a cost of $1 billion per year, according to New-York-based by Basex.

All told, Basex says, information overload costs the U.S. economy $900 billion per year.

“Intel has long been a leader in the silicon revolution and in the adoption of knowledge sharing and collaboration technologies, but these technologies took a toll,” Jonathan B. Spira, CEO and chief analyst at Basex and a co-author of the new report said in prepared remarks. “At Intel, information overload was found to cause a significant loss of productivity and reduction in innovation and dramatically impacted employee quality of life.”

Here are some nuggets from the Intel report, in case you want to compare your data deluge:

The typical Intel employee was receiving 50-100 e-mail messages daily

• Intel employees were on average spending 20 hours per week handling e-mail
• 30 percent of e-mails at Intel were unnecessary
• Top Intel executives reported receiving up to 300 messages per day
• Intel as a company received on average 3 million e-mails a day

You can find more on the Intel case study on Basex’ Web site, but to get the whole report, you’ll have to shell out, at “a special introductory price of $699.”