hehe nice hobby Bill, also thx for the +1's and comments I think you did forget my Dual P3/EB setup Gradinko, which is my first Dual CPU build also from January 28, 2000
What you have with your new gen setups is what I have with Dual Opterons and old Pentium 3 setups.
The really old ones are fun to renovate and get back to life again, also I have a great passion for High wend VGA cards of all ages, I use them in all my setups to give myself a number on how they perform in various scenarios
If I'd buy a Dual Xeon I'd build a Dual Xeon 3.06Ghz with an Intel i860 Chipset and 4GB PC-800-40 RAMBUS ECC Reg Memory from Samsung Original, Mobo would be a Supermicro, iWiLL or Tyan, all depending what I could find
The new gen Xeons are out of my price range nor interest. For one high end Xeon I can buy 2 to 3 similar performing Opteron 6300 series and beat that Xeon in any type of workload.
So for me, Dual Opterons has always proved me a formidable performance for good money, since I am more of a workstation type, the AMD Opteron CPU's are the right ones for me. I have been using Dual Opteron workstations since 2004 and still I don't want anything else, I am not much of a gamer either so the i7 isn't something I seek either.
This way we all have our thing and likes in the vast computing world
And with a thread such as this one it's fun to find out what everyone is using these days and how he or she did their builds
As benchmarking goes I only run what I find useful and that is BarsWF x64 CUDA Client, it gives me the numbers I seek for my workstation needs:
http://forums.evga.com/fb.ashx?m=1834872 As for 3D mark, I don't interest such software which is mostly full of cheats and hacks, I was never fond of it, so such software shall never enter my systems!
And if I want to see how a game performs I prefer to test that game myself, the results are far more useful and more reliable, FarCry3 like Crysis 2 for example run creamed on my main system with the EVGA GTX 680 SC SE's min max 60fps @ 1920 x 1200 x32 which is perfect for my needs :)
As for 3D mark, *ugh* well I don't need such software to tell me a score I can't use to determine my system's relative performance, I mean my games will give me the numbers I seek anyways, so also due to that I never saw sense in running it
I use my PC's to render self made HD video's also to compile recorded game night events of the Descent Task Force & the Descent Rangers and play some single player games, I don't use them to run 3D Mark all day, I have better things to do
As single player games go I only play FarCry3, Fallout3, Fallout New Vegas & Just Cause 2 And that is mostly it. Multiplayer wise I do mainly Descent 1&2 with DXX-Rebirth 0.57.3 & D2X-XL 1.16.16 and for the change of things sometimes play CoD MW2 with the Rotterdam MW2 Clan, a small private club of friends.