1) The issues raised by Eric and others are very relevant. Simply throwing more cores at a given task doesn't automatically imply "better performance", at some point processor cache coherency, and resultant memory faults are going to begin to swamp any benefit offered by multiple cores; this is why I take his statement regarding 6 cores for Lightroom very seriously. In my experience, comparing CS5 rendering a 14 shot pano on my X58 and a new Dual Xeon (12 total cores), revealed a suprisingly small performance difference. Running Windows Resource Monitor during the render on both machines, showed relatively little CPU utilization.
For video, I would expect a different result, as ppbm5's statistics bear out. But again, Premiere relies heavily on nVidia's CUDA GPU methods.
In any case, it would be tough for me to recommend the X58, in the face of the X79 coming out. I did pose the 8-core 1366 question to my Intel Rep - he simply responded with another question; "Now why would we cannibalize 2011 sales?" 8 cores on 32nm process in the face of the newer Ivy Bridge 22nm process with trigate transistors?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384909,00.aspProbably not... In my opinion the forthcoming Z79/Socket 2011 hardware is going to be every bit the "monster" that the X58 was when *it* came out 3 years ago.
2) I'll never overclock; I guess our conservatism shows in different ways....
3) Mountain Mods are made in my backyard (well close) in Hoods River, OR. I'm quite knocked out by the quality, and modularity. A bit industrial at first glance, I'm planning on replacing exterior hardware with recessed, smoothing appearance out - none the less, the one consistent comment I get is "wow".
4) LOL - that exactly why I posted it. The comment about the nVidia support engineer (if true) is telling. Lots of confusion....
From my understanding, PS-CS5 doesn't really have to "support" 10bit color, any more than it "supports" 16bit printing. Internally, it's 15 (+1) bit of course - the interface to outside devices and their attendant colorspaces would be dependant on the the individual device capabilties;
Eizo has definately documented 10bit display color for CS5 for Windows 7 to it's panels via ATI adapters in the link I provided above.
Which begs the question; do we need it? For me, certainly not - i rarely, if ever, see display banding, and fully understand that it will have no effect on my printed output. I've read that 10bit color *is* important for rendering and evaluating broadcast color - but to my knowledge that is normally done on dedicated hardware/applications (ie: Davinci Resolve).