I'm slowly starting to like TF2, adding that to my collection of favs.

I'd love to benchmark it but I'm unable to until I actually buy the server. However, I also got offered an i7 3930k based system which has a much higher clockspeed over the Xeon. I also have a current E3-1230 v3 (haswell) based server running comfortable with 2 instances per physical core (1 per logical) so I'm guessing that it scales the same with the i7 3930k (sandy).

The E3 Haswells are pretty beast. I'm running a 1230 v3 with 32 GB of RAM, and I'm running out of RAM way before I'm running out of CPU power. If only Intel would make them able to handle 64 GB of RAM....

The Xeon haswells look like desktop chips with ECC enabled to me. And since some of the desktop chips have ECC enabled, I'm not even sure if they have that going for them.

Then again, the only i7-class chip with ECC enabled is the 4700EQ, which is only available in a soldered-to-motherboard configuration. I don't think any non-soldered desktop chips have ECC above 2 cores.