>Now, in following that line of thought, if someone here were
>to purchase one of the PD's, would they use the stock hsf?
I don't think intel should sell it in the first place, if it doesn't work as advertised (indeed *IF*), so with aircooling, using motherboards specced for the TDP is has, etc. If it doesn't work under those circumstances, its an overclocked chip, not a 3.2 GHZ part. It would be like AMD selling a 3.2 GHz A64 that possibly maybe works with phase change cooling, or otherwise needs to be clocked lower. Would you pay more for that than for a stock FX55/57 ?
>As a server it could end up in a similar multitasking
>environment. LOL, ok maybe not that similar..
Indeed, not similar AT ALL. There really is nothing media encoding performance (mostly SSE, FP and bandwith dependant)let alone gaming performance will tell you how these chips will perform under typical server workloads (mostly integer code and latency sensitive), even if both are threaded. If you want to know how well these chips perform under those loads, read any Xeon and Opteron server review and you will know.
BTW, I hope you are not suggesting watercooled servers, are you ?
= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =