> What I've would of liked of seen is your SB clocked at 3.6GHz just like john's E8400. > Of course your 4.8GHz SB will blow the E8400 away so it's not a good comparison. What > I would like to know and I'm others would like to see I'm sure is a clock for clock > comparison.
Because insane overclocks are the entire fucking point of SNB[1] if you already have a Wolfdale (if you have a Merom/Conroe era C2D, the per-clock improvement actually does start to get interesting, and if you have a P4, run don't walk to upgrade). If you're going to run it stock, then yes, you can assume performance about 5% better than a same-clocked Wolfdale on software not using the new AVX instructions (which will be nearly everything for another 12 months while the compiler guys get going). But at that point you've spent a lot of money for mostly a lot of nothing.
[1] Intel marketing violently disagrees with this, but I'm being real here.