[abenkori]

Do you mean that you think a Nahelem single quadcore processore is likely to work better with Snow Leopard than an 8-core harpertown Xeon machine? I believe I could upgrade to snow leopard, backwards compatible to a year-old harpertown intel processor machine.. I think the cost of an upgrade is either free or affordable...what I want to find out is whether thr 1-yr old 8 core is better than the 6 month old quadcore nehalem.

What I am really asking everyone, is their opinion about two-to four times the the RAM capacity (albeit DDR2) in the harpertown 8-core-which is 32gig-versus the single quadcore nahalem-which, according to mac, will max out at only 8 GIG... and (may be upgradeable, while voiding Mac's warranty) to 16 gig.

that's the critical question.
Slightly an apples-to oranges comparisson, but I'm sure some one among us has real experience comparing

Thanks.