Maximum PC

You're buying a server/workstation proc?

your still going to wait, they wont be out till next year sometime.

And besides work, many look to these for their own desktops for a few bucks more than their equivalent desktop counterparts. I've ran Xeons in my own builds up until Sandybridge, and I'd probably have a Sandy Xeon if I wasn't tinkering with iTX so heavily in that period. I just know they're solid and will take some errant punches I toss at them in order to be forgiven more easily.

While most Xeons are aimed directly at servers with those server perks, some are tossed down to us consumers that work fine in desktops. The validation for Xeons are even more brutal than common CPU's and you're paying just a tad more in order to have that validation and server stuff that didn't pass the test (and don't need) stunted. And it's not that much more money in the end. $30? I'll pay it.

And with every CPU, there's diamonds in the rough. Highest stable OC's I've personally had have been w/ Xeons. I can be more hamfisted with them and not adjust 50 different things in the BIOS and be delicate about it as I would usually do with common CPU's.

What's the system cost difference between if you were to get as close as possible with specs? I would think Servers/Workstations are more expensive considering their target market.

I'm running a server processor in my gaming rig (Opteron 3280), but only because I'm to lazy to swap the X6-1055t back into the rig. And since the Opteron handles gaming nearly as well as the 1055t, I don't see a need to swap back. Of course I'm planning on selling both CPU's soon & upgrading to an i7-3930K / LGA-2011 system for the improved 1080p video editing / Blu-Ray encoding.

Ivy Bridge E is a full year away, so no I'm not going to wait that long, I'll be swapping right around Xmas Besides, X79 already has PCI Express 3.0... native USB 3.0 is not an issue for me... and the X79 board I'm looking at has 8 SATA 6 ports, 2 on the X79 chipset which would support my two Vertex 4 SSD's in RAID-0 quite nicely, plus 2 on the improved Marvel 9220 controller (for additional SSD's when prices drop some more), & 4 more on the older Marvel 9172 controller for SATA III HDD's.

I'm not even going to consider Thunderbolt till my next full ground-up build in 5 - 7 years.

Finally, the 3930K is so much faster than my 1055t, even with the 1055t overclocked to 3.5GHz the 3930K runs folding @ home at up to 5x the ppd output on standard SMP WU's, and encodes video up to 2x faster before any overclocking.