Maybe appease both arguments by stating:

AMD could make it cheaper!

Show me that Xeons don't make crapload more profit than equiv speed i7's.

Please take your intel bashing to another thread, or even better yet, a whole different forum.

Thank you.

There's no point in bashing Intel. They have the best cpu's to date hands down. If I had the $$ for a decent i7 build, I would be on it like a fat kid on cake.

For now I will have to limp along on AMD's top cpu which does what I need it to very well. Also very impressed with AM3 overclockability, best I had yet.

Ski - are you exploring the SR2 avenue possibly?

All of the AMD CPU's I ran were excellent performers, and while the A64s were king, they too commanded top dollar.

I was talking to Rob yesterday about the SR2 solution.

Both of my previous dual socket gaming boards were king of the day...that being the ABIT BP6 (1999) with Ultra ATA-66 and 2x AGP, and the ABIT VP6 with 4x AGP and built in RAID 0,1. The former board could get a 100% overclock on the poor socket 370 Celeron 400s from Costa Rica, and on air at that. It was on this board where I started to design my own custom CPU heatsinks and perfected the hard volt mod.

The SR2 has the potential to be just as fun and rewarding as the BP6, but with 11 more years of experience and knowledge.

I'm thinking these Westmere cores will max out between 5.4 Ghz to 6Ghz on chilled water, so I'm stuck on selecting the right CPU and would like to see a few more oc'd via reviews before I decide. Also there are only B1 stepping available right now, but newer steppings are due soon.

Cheers

Well if you do decide to go that route, I am interested in seeing some results, photos of the setup etc.

Found a cheaper version, and it'll fit inside most cases!
http://en.expreview.com/2010/04/13/sneak-peek-of-gigabyte-x58a-ud9-mobo-with-seven-pci-e-slots/7041.html

Yes I know it's not a dual socket Xeon-only board, but most of us live in the land of limited monetary resources.

Judging by the items in your signature, you're not one of them right now.

The Gigabyte board is going to be a solid performer and has been LN2 tested over at:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... p?t=248891

Amazing that LN2 is getting ~ 20% more OC than over maximum air.

The cost of a second XEON for the SR2 is much cheaper than LN2 costs for oc'ing a single cpu to performance levels of a dual Xeon between 4.8 to 5 GHz.

I think the better buy for the enthusiast is the EVGA quad sli/xfire due to the additional EVGA control panel hardware. I used several Abit boards which had the uGuru chip and panel that made everything much easier.

LN2 Costs for 24/7 operation = priceless

Air = Free

Exactly

I cheaped out on the SSD's, like I literally got the cheapest kit I could.
That's the only rediculous item I think is in my computers. It has awesomely undeniable speed, but over the long run it was a 1300$ mistake, IMO. I should have bought a couple of raptors instead. Damn you enablers at MB, DAMMMMN YOOOOUUUU!

If you're knocking eyefinity...it's freaking cool, and I'll shout it from the rooftops.

hmmm... interesting... care to elaborate? I'm 'Raptor equipped' at the moment but have been thinking about moving to SSD...

Kinda hard to link drives, but "the usual places" will have a wide selection.

There really is no such thing as a "cheap" SSD, although there are "cheaper" ones.

I got gen 1 drives, that don't have "Trim" and are MLC, and a shoddy JMicron controller. Total spent was 1300$ including the raid card. Buying one drive (60GB) would have quite easily replaced a 74GB raptor no problem. I can't really use them as OS drives due to the lack of proper wear levelling (jury is still out on that). They probably won't last a year or 2 as an OS drive. The nice Intel drives and whatnot (500$) would be the proper drives to use. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that. Mind you those 500$ drives will only get 200MB read/writes.

I wanted 500MB/s read writes and it would have cost 1300$ no matter which way i was going. SO technically the 4 of the 250$ drives are quicker than 2 of the 500$ drives, with basically the same amount of usable space.

Bascially the plan is to use them as fast storage, and then when proper drives show up "sometime in the future", that cost about 1$ per GB. I think I'll be waiting a while, though. So I'm stuck with this 74GB raptor drive, so i figure a 450GB next gen (probably last gen) raptor sometime this year, would be my only upgrade before Bulldozer sometime in '11.

I think the real spiffy use of them is in laptops. Replacing that crappy 120GB 5400rpm drive with a 80GB drive SSD, even if the laptop is 2 years old, would yield a 10 times (if not more) increase when it comes to IO.

The market is maturing and we're seeing generation 3 and 4, I really should have waited a year to get the SSDs, and got another 300GB raptor instead, but I'm happy with the performance, and I should be able to sell them at a decent price when all is said and done.

I don't knock hardware or those who choose different configurations than my own. I am actually looking at the 6 port Radeon for running six monitors. There is no such thing as too large of a desktop.

The prices of 6 monitor stands is quite scary. Apparently it costs at least 150$ to ship anything to Canada. Bloody shame.