Also look around www.anandtech.com.

A lot of the benchmarks on those websites usually don't apply to Vegas. Example: low latency RAM does nothing for Vegas, while it shows a few percent performance boost for other apps.

MPEG2 encoding benchmarks with the Main Concept encoder are relevant however.

2- The motherboard reviews can be misleading. Manufacturers tend to send overclocked or slightly-overclocked samples so that's why some motherboards are slightly faster. Lowering the timings on memory is similar to overclocking, and is a feature found on Asus motherboards. Enabling PAT is another way to increase performance (incidentally, it does nothing for Vegas).
Production models will not be slightly overclocking, will not have PAT enabled, and will not run the RAM at lower timings (that feature isnt enabled by default).

I'd probably look at rendertest.veg results here, they are likely the best predictor of Vegas performance.

Thanks for your replies. The dual core processor stuff has my attention but the cost does not. Making a decision on these units is worse than channel surfing 140 channels.

JJK

"Making a decision on these units is worse than channel surfing 140 channels." . .weelll in the UK, on analogue, we only have 5 channels to make a decision about - much easier! Get the picture?

Best regards,

Grazie