Xeon X3370 vs. Core2 E7400 for benching run

Hey guys,

I've been out of the scene for quite a while now. In fact, my last benchmarking-related post seems to have been on 11/08/2006, and it was a 10.8s Super Pi run with a 4.7GHz E6600 on my autocascade, so apparently I was already pretty far "out of it" at that point, as I didn't even bother putting the chip under my cascade or LN2.

Anyway, I recently moved and I figured, while everything I owned was already torn apart, it would be a good time to upgrade. Since all my boards are still 775-pin and I didn't really want to have to buy all new boards and memory, I decided just to get some new CPUs. With my employee discount, I was able to get a Xeon X3370 (3.0, quad, 12M) and a Core2 E7400 (2.8, dual, 3M) for about $200 total. Sweet deal, no?

So now I have to decide what I'm going to do with what. My desktop currently has a Q6600, my media PC has an E6600, and my home server has an E6320. I'm planning on putting the Xeon in my desktop, but I don't know where to go after that. I'm thinking of moving the Q6600 to the server and putting the E7400 in the media pc, as it seems like clock speed would be more important than cores for an HTPC system, but on the other hand the server is on 24/7 and the quad will draw more power (which is very expensive where I am right now).

Any thoughts on what CPU to use in what system would be appreciated, but that's not really my main question. See, I'm planning on busting out the cascade and doing my first real benching run in over 3 years before I put everything together, but I don't know whether the E7400 or the X3370 would be better. I'm probably going to run the usual variety of Pi and Futuremark benches, but I've not been keeping up with whether they like raw clock-speed or multi-core systems with lots of cache. I also have no idea where the clock-speed ceiling is on either of these chips; I'm just assuming the dual will hit a higher speed than the quad.

I will probably use the IP35 Pro board from my desktop, and I have a total of 8x1GB G.Skill PC6400 C4 and 4x2GB G.Skill PC6400 C4, so it would also be nice to know whether more memory or faster memory is better these days. Finally, I have a pair of GeForce 8800GTs, and a single Radeon 4870. I will probably just stick with the Radeon unless someone suggests otherwise, as I won't be able to put phase-change on 2 video cards.

Thanks for reading the long-winded post, and thanks for any insight into what hardware the benchmarks will like best. I'm looking forward to doing this again :)

Cache is king in benchmarks... I did some tests with dual cores comparing the "new" pentium E6300, E7400 and E8600 (Test here) It also will depend a lot on how far the IP35 can push it, I would buy a bench board like a giga EP34 UD3P for DDR2 runs... but if you got them CPU's and a cascade just bench them all...