My Dual Harper - Asus Z7S WS living review *56K warning*

[drewhemm]

I must say that for anyone who is considering a rig like this the raw processor benchmarks don't do the potential and capacity of this setup justice - in my opinion, it's the multitasking that is most important for daily workstation use - the ability to do more things at once; for me, that will directly translate into more income - the speed is a bonus!

I'd be curious to know how a dual-harpertown workstation would compare to a single Core i7, as the latter can also execute 8 threads, but only has four physical cores. I've read reviews that say that hyperthreading is much better on the Core i7 than on previous processors, but I still have a gut feeling that it's better to have 8 physical cores - I haven't found any direct comparisons yet. Otherwise, a comparative setup would be a quad socket AMD (more cores but slower clocks) or a dual Core i7, but dual Core i7 boards aren't available from Asus yet, I heard that overclocking is limited and the power consumption is higher compared to the 50w L5420s.

I'm currently downloading a trial of VMware Workstation as I'm curious to see how well it runs virtualization, I may end up running 64-bit Windows XP on the host and 32-bit Windows XP on the guest. Might be reason for me to upgrade to 16GB quad channel RAM. I'll report back on that...