kenc51 wrote:Why do you need such a high-end system btw? What do you work @?
With the money you have spent I'm not sure if I'd even overclock!

Exactly the reason why I haven't jumped on overclocking the current system just yet.
Why such a high-end system? Well, considering that I'm using a $1,000 video encoding piece of software I find it important to use high-end quality components for it. Plus, I have a rather varied requirement for my systems.
1) My job is cyber security for a large organization and I have to think in large scale.
2) My other job on that job is understanding Windows based servers.
3) I have gone haywire with doing video encoding.
4) My family needs a system for them to use without all my junk on it.
5) I must do testing at home, not at work so I need something that can closely emulate what I have at work - including testing Windows 2003 with active directory.
6) Cyber security requires understanding how to audit with Linux/Unix based systems.
7) I used to be a database developer/web-based front-end programmer and hence the lack of need for a dual Opteron anymore but it affected my taste with hardware.

Thanks to the latest offerings from VMWare, I was finally able to reduce 6 systems down to 3. VMWare now lets me test 64-bit systems while still using a host 32-bit system and now dual proc/dual-core is supported in the guest systems.
I did finally bench the Cheetahs: r/w has improved marginally but burst rate has been cut in half to the speed of a Raptor.

I don't like Whining Digital drives and hence no way will I switch to a Raptor.