I say benchmarks have little use for me because I've never bought a consumer pc - always made them or had them made. I don't play pc games anymore either, so I'm more interested in how responsive the pc is to use - a bit like how a 0-60 time for a bike or car is often not representative of how they are to ride or drive. I'm not against benchmarks, if you're buying a pc for playing games then they give an accurate picture of how game 'x' performs on system 'y'. And I agree OSX is not a good choice for games, but I've not had any problems with anything else. What I'm essentially saying and in response to the question asked in the thread was I would spend any extra money available in my budget on striped hard disks, a better graphics card and more ram, before spending money on a different brand of chip because it performed faster in a benchmark, that's all.