I have a Mhackintosh with Core2 Quad Q6600, 4-cores running at 3.0Ghz, and ran GeekBench 32bits on it. Final score is deceiving, but Integer score, that matter for my kinda application is explosive : 7098!
It’s over a Core i7 2.8Ghz iMac geekbench 32bits Integer score (under 7000), so it’s a perfect fit for a computer that will run up to 3 Virtual Machines for development and Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL (LAMP) software simulation and test. All these software do mainly if not uniquely Integer computation.
In this case, floating point computation is of no importance whatsoever, and memory speed not so important with 8MB cache on-chip 
PS: I will go back to 3.2Ghz and test reliability of the Quad-core Mhackintosh under heavy load, at 3.0Ghz it’s perfect, I just re-encoded 3 Full HD movies in 4.3GB H.264 today!
My ACER 5620 motherboard just died! Anyway this motherboard with proprietary locked bios wasn’t the best to use on Mac OS X, disabling me to run the Core2 Quad Q6600 as it’s full speed (full overclocked speed!), and could only receive one graphic card, there was just 300W power, the box had little room… Adios!
I bought an ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo (with 2 PCI-Express x16 graphic port), overclocking-oriented BIOS, an ASUS Radeon 4670 512MB (for OpenCL Benchs, with my GeForce 8800 GTS), Fatal1ty 550W modular power, and a big tower with 3.5″ SATA hard-drive bay (to be able to swap boot hard-drive on a snap).
I just installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64bits, because I need Windows for my Polar Cardio (guys this suck), Fritz, ChessBase, AnyDVD HD and BR-Rebuilder. Windows 7 is far behind Leopard in term of overall ergonomy and user-experience, but you have to use Mac OS X to understand!
So my actual configuration is:
- Motherboard ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo
- Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 4×3.2Ghz
- 4×2GB DDR2-800
- 1TB 7200 rpm boot drive (one for Windows7, one for OS X)
- 2TB 7200 rpm Video drive
- ATI Radeon 4670 512MB
- nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 320MB
- DVD reader-writer
- Blu-Ray Reader (and DVD reader-writer)
- 24″ 1920×1200 ACER display
- Apple keyboard
- Logitech Mouse
So it’s a pretty good configuration, that may be compared to a Core i5 iMac, for a fraction of it’s price. I am trying to install iAtkos v7i (a 10.5.7 distro).
This is just a prototype, running with small number of cores (48) compared to GPU (hundreds), but is it interesting in may ways, because it it a grand son of iAPX 432, the first 32bits microprocessor. (see Intel SCC Cloud-computing 48-core processor prototype)
iAPX 432 was a great advancee in CISC processors, and maybe the most advanced of 32 bits chips ever, albeit being the first 32bits microprocessor. Not in terms of performances, ’cause it was lagging behind a 286+287 16bits microprocessor, but because of it’s object-oriented, multithreaded, message-passing design. This design was unequalled in the 32 bits world!
And now iNTEL, creator of iAPX 432, introduces some of the advances of this old-design (early 80’s), into it’s next generation design, conceived for cloud computing as well as desktop computing, that we may have in our computers within the next 3-5 years! I feel excited!