Ok, its been a short while, so I thought Id add a post before it wanders off into obscurity.
Done a couple of things to both the I7 systems.
Both are running a pair of Mushkin RAM, the same stuff at the same speeds etc.
Both running a GTX470 - again a matching pair from my SLI setup.
Both have Windows 7/64 installed, with the very same drivers with the obvious exception of the motherboard drivers obviously, and I have also added an Audigy 2 ZS cos I have 2 of those .
Anyway, I have run a number of benchmarks and I must say that there is absolutely ZERO difference in performance between the two
Even as much as running SuperPI MOD 1.5 they scored 14.030 for the 1156/860 and 14.339 for the 1366/930
I run a fairly wide range of benches, and the results did fluctuate a little, but then they often do even when running on the same system, but the basics are that all results showed the systems to be on par within an error margin of absolutely no more than a couple of %
3DMark2001, 2003, 2006, 110, AquaMark3, Furmark, Unigene Heaven 4, Passmark, Prime95 and SuperPI all showed pretty much the same scores, and also converting Video files from AVI to MPG in both single core, and multi-core modes.
They are as I say... the same.
Now, the Mushkin are 2 Black and 2 Yellow, and they are the same spec etc but 1.5v and 1.65v - might make a difference to triple channel, and my AMD Hex Core Media Center has 4x2GB so I will plop 3 of those in to see about triple channel, but yeah, 4 Core CPU wont benefit from triple channel as opposed to a 6 core CPU surely?
I think what I am simply going to do, is try to flog off the 1156 CPU & Board, and the 1366 CPU and get a 980X 6 Core I7 plonked in there.