Is this your new toy MM? Couldn't imagine running CEP2 full load with this puppy. Hard disk would never catch up. Would like to know what kind of hard drive is being used though. 80 wu's must keep the hard drive pretty busy.

This kind of machine don't use one hard drive. It will probably work against some sort of enterprise-level RAID array: Each drive is relatively speedy, 10,000 RPM or so, and then you stripe the reads and writes over five, ten or however many disks you need to keep up with the demand.

But yeah, 80 cores on a single consumer drive would spell disaster

Not mine..I'm just a 'Po white boy"
5-2600K SB systems would out do that machine for a lot less money
( a LOT less) and probably use less elec doing it.

So far SB is about 10% clock for clock better than the earlier i7's, but that's about it. Yes a stock SB can outperform a stock i7-860 by about 20% but that's nothing special for a new generation of CPU, and half is down to raised clocks. In the last Q of the year the big-brother versions might tweak out a bit more performance, but we will have to wait and see. Perhaps there is also something yet to be gained with new code.