CPU benchmark advice

Oh yeah, that does remind me, I do have some pretty wicked memory in here. Tuned just so to get maximum speed out of it (which usualyl in most things I do effects overall feel of speed my computer has more then pure cpu power).

If I recall my DDR3 is running at 1600 with timings 7-8-7-20.

Quick little note to compare, DDR3 running at 1600 here too, but with 9-9-9-24 timings. Anyway, at 4 threads I don't suspect I'm hitting memory bandwidth bottlenecks, whereas it looks like I may be at 6 threads.

The cores all share an L3 cache too... I wonder if it's worth the extra $100 to get 1600 RAM (and the mobo that supports it). I've been buying Macs for the last 5 years, I feel like such a noob examining this kinda thing again. =)

Extra $100 for 1600MHz RAM? My ram only cost $50 for 8GB, and I didn't see notably cheaper in slower ram really. As far as motherboard, mine was a little fancier than some others, but it was only about $115. So... It shouldn't cost $100 extra for 1600MHz ram.

Yeah, I'm looking at barebones kits which default to a pretty cheapy motherboard, so most of that was to upgrade to a decent one. Prolly worth it anyway, and while it's not quite Apple-level gouging on memory itself, I guess it's universally true that I should buy/install my own. ;)