Mobo = Asrock Z77-Extreme

CPU = Intel i5-3550 mildly OCd to 3.5GHz
(cooled to just above ambient w/ CoolerMaster Hyper 212 stacked 120mm fans)

Ram = 8GB Corsair Vengeance LowLatency

GPU = Gigabyte nVidia GTX-760 w/ 2GB

I'm extremely pleased with this box. It looks nice in an Antec piano black case and is reasonably quiet especially for as hard as I push it. I do semi-pro audio recording and mixing/editing, compile all my kernels, some video editing, and I'm a fairly hardcore gamer but almost never boot to windows (uptimes in excess of 6 months are commonplace). I have yet to say to myself, "Gee that was disappointing. I need more power". It handles everything I throw at it with aplomb.

I use KDE quite a lot but for a few months have been quite pleased with Xfce4 with specific KDE support loaded by default. I use KWin compositing. Presently I have Firefox open with 15 tabs open and --------

CPU is at 2%, Ram at 9% load average: 0.11, 0.10, 0.13 w/ 157 default processes

If you'd like a comparison to full KDE desktop, just ask.

Pentium D 3.4 ghz - 4 gigs of ram - geforce gt 630. If i compile a kernel while watching a movie or playing a game i can sometimes max out both chips, i hardly ever use all the ram tho.

The only resource that i dont max out would probably be video memory. I have a gig on the card and even playing quake 4 i have never seen it use more than 500mb or so.

I'll get the cubietruck here(India)in way cheaper price than the Odroid U3 and will get a SATA port + VGA port. My 19' monitor doesn't have a HDMI port. On paper Cubietruck is more impressive than the Odroid U3. I have a 320GB SATA HDD lying idle, waiting to be used.

I was almost sold on RPI B+ as the kits are available cheap in here however the cause of my holding back is really outdated Armv6 and the network performance of the 10/100 Ethernet. At this moment, I'm totally torn between BBB Rev C and CT. Or may be I should wait for 2015 Q1 for more boards and versions to appear?

Regards.

Goodness



Core 2 Quad Q9550
4 GB of RAM

Sometimes I use 100% CPU time and other times it is almost 0. It depends on what I am doing

PrinceCruise.........
Personally I would go for the CT over the Beaglebone, unless your planning some electronic making project. (pretty sure the BB is comparable to the PI in networking)

Some of you mentioned gaming

The gaming aspect under Linux does raise my interest, as it has been years since I tried it. (relative kept buying me games, trying to get me to get another Windows machine, which I hadn't used at home for around 8 years or so) I finally broke down and bought one this year and am going through the learning about compatibility issues with 8.1 (not much different then when I tried to see if I could play Sacred 2 under Linux, years ago, the last software I missed Windows for). No reason to hook Windows to my normal network or make it a dual boot, IMHO. (bad weather, winter gamer only, very light and playing now ancient games for the most part) The only reason I justified a Windows machine, was my job could be changing in the next year or two, and I am enough out of Windows (and it has changed enough), I want to be able to relearn/feel competent in it.

There are still commands I haven't used under Linux but think I would find useful (never taken the time to learn). Things like Wget to download a Youtube video to watch later for example, just because. I think making a distro would keep me out of the gaming machine and teach me more useful stuff, while driving me to try to learn new commands that I have/haven't thought about. (time is ALWAYS an issue, but right now I am on mandatory overtime, which would pay for the missing computer pieces and not take money from anything else) The overtime and doing some more research, I am leaning away from an anniversary dual core pentium or I3-xxxxT, to one of the I7-47x0T processors (depending on stock when I order Lower power draw/heat). For at least five years I used an atom after my main dual boot system died, so now I want to go more the opposite way to somewhat future proof and convert my other system to the storage box.

Thank you all guys. Merry Xmas!

My rig
 

HP/Compaq DC 7700 CMT (Refurb)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 2.13GHz
4GB (4x1GB) DDR2 RAM
Besides doing the usual E-mail, Interwebbing etc., I play IL2-Sturmovik Ultimate Edition with all mods through Wine. The CPU is never stressed. Although I am thinking of "upgrading" to a Core 2 Quad.

i added load average to my first post, sorry bro, forgot it the first time.

intel core i3 3rd generation @ 3.3ghz
8gb of system ram
Mint 17 64bit, Mate Desktop

I am using intel dual core processor with 2GB ram and 500GB HDD

In my desktop I've a, now ancient, AMD FX-8120 -- I think it was the first "eight core" (I'll let you google how it is and isn't if you care) CPU for the consumer desktop and I have to say that it does seem to allow maxing out individual cores without affecting processes on other ones. I've 32GB of RAM because I originaly bought 16 but when I installed a new CPU cooler* it impinged upon the R*M in such a way as to cause memory errors so when I upgraded I decided the small extra cost would make me feel better about having to buy the RAM. I play with VMs a lot but have to admit that by the time I get to the stage of maxing out the RAM things like disk IO and processor speed are already limiting me enough to make things less than ideal.

*the processor runs far too hot, I am awaiting a new case fairly soon but not convinced it will help.

I forget what AMD called their thing. Where Intel has Hyperthreading, using two logical cores sharing a real FPU core, AMD says theirs is 2 real cores, sharing a logical FPU core. On paper, it was supposed to be a better design than Hyperthreading.

Still using a Sempron 145 since 2011 (I may build something newer soon)
Have 4 gigs ram. Under normal use (surfing, Youtube, playing DVD) never seen it get above 50% usage IIRC, average being around 9% or so.

I think Modules.

Yup that's it. This is what Wikipedia says:

"The modular architecture consists of multithreaded shared L2 cache and FlexFPU, which uses simultaneous multithreading. Each physical integer core, two per module, is single threaded, in contrast with Intel's Hyperthreading, where two virtual simultaneous threads share the resources of a single physical core."

I have to say the "cores" are great fun to watch in Conky and theprocessor seems to do the job but from my experience and having read around a little I wouldn't recommend AMD though.