hodrop

Yes. wise choise, definitely E5-26xx the road to go now, one can start with 1 cpu and dubbel the performance later. If you building yourself i would recommend watercoling x 2, have one Corsair H100. went with chassi made for that modell . built my in november, and I usaly complement with quadras from amazon, since they strangely are always twice the price here. almost got a used Q6000 then but they dident export.

please report performance. both tesla and 26xx.

I tok a shot with gtx580 figured i could always go with quadra 4000 later if it dident worked, so far very good, somtimes after long running without restart(days) the small yellow help popup text in houdini wash out , running latest release 295.40 of driver which is not always the best thing to do.

quadro 4000 with Tesla C2075 i think is a good solution.

would like to see some test AMD Opteron 6282 SE against
the Xeon E5-2687W is avalible now

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xeon-e5-2687w-benchmark-review,3149-8.html [tomshardware.com]

I wanted one dual xeon also!
but went with 3960X and 64 gb ram, fx580 3gb and one portable
Quadro FX 3000M, Core i7-2820QM,16GB RAM

runing dual boot win 7 and ubuntu 10.04 on both and everything works fine,

CL is of ourse muhch faster on fx580, but its good to have a nice laptop also to do tests whenever you like.

maybe looking into fedora later, AMD Opteron 6282 SE looks intresting.