Quote Originally Posted by drewhemm View Post
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...
My Dual X5450's at 4,05Ghz are around 30-50% faster than an i7 clocked at 4Ghz. Leave out benches that are completely memory-dependant (like Winrar) and you get closer to 50% most of the time. Apps I have compared so far: WCG HCC, Cinebench, 3DMark CPU, TrueCrypt, wPrime. I think there was more.. I should do a comprehensive writeup of the results I know, but I really don't have the time

So for now, you can either believe me, or bench for yourself
The most important factor on a Dual S771 setup (besides the CPU clock speed) is the FSB, by the way. If you compare my bench runs and daily results with same or higher clocked CPUs on a ST with lower FSB, the Z7S always wins. FSB is a real bottleneck here, every Mhz helps especially as you go up in clock speed.