my advice to you would buy a dual AMD Opteron based mother board and processors to go with it. they would work better on heavy loads. the x2 is a very good processor but Opteron just fits your type of work. and you said that money is not a big factor so you might just buy 2 dual core opterons and get a lot of ram and have computer that lasts for at least 5 years. opterons are not as good as athlons when it come's to gaming but they are work horses and could hold there own when it comes to gaming. and opterons communicate from one to the other much better than any intel xeon based system.