— if anyone ever want the ultimate deal for multithread performance, you should check out the xeon 2nd hand market. I just built a dual e5-2696 v2. cost of both cpu ($580). cost of z9ped16 MB ($370). cost of 64GB DDR3 ($120). Here's the bench: http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/5285848 obviously the single and quad core number does suck but the multithread number is even slightly better than that of 1950X. on top of that, much cheaper ddr3 ecc ram...