HUH? I got 8 cores running at 3.8. It's called hyperthreading. Shows as 8 everywhere I look. Running full on 3.8, with turbo turned off. Look, that's all I have to read of your latest essay to know you don't have a clue. It's a Mac Pro Killer, anyways. The iMac is too easy to beat. Two hours to put together and all I've had to do since is clean the air filters. You're way off on your Crucial memory price by about 100%, it's OCZ Platinum 7 7 7 24 1600, don't need a firewire card, there's that and a ton of ports on the mobo. Wifi on a desktop? LOL. i7 920 running 3.8? I think it was $250. Can't even buy a Mac running that fast. Win 7 free till next year when I get a SSD for it. Keep trying.
I know very well what hyperthreading is. And, no, you don't. The fact that you think you have eight core shows you haven't got a clue. Those are "virtual cores." The iMac can do it as well. To get eight true cores either requires a dual socket MB or time to wait for Intel to develop a 1366 socket 8 core processor. They are working on a six core now.
As for the Crucial memory, the challenge was to meet the specs of an iMac which would include the quality of the type of RAM installed as well as the features such as WIFI and Firewire capability out of the box, not to make a computer with the features Cabojoe thinks are desireable. The Crucial memory was priced yesterday and was the cheapest of the top RAM of the quality that Apple always puts in it's computers thereby meeting the specs of the challenge.
And you haven't an economic clue how to compare prices either. All you have listed is the compilation of the sum of the costs of the parts. You'd go broke.
I thought you had a Core i7. Those only come in four cores and only one can be on a board. You'd need a four-core, dual-processor Xeon to get 8 cores.
"Hyperthreading" is the Intel brand name for simultaneous multithreading, a trick to make one processor core act like two for the OS. There is hardware on the core to help it juggle two threads and keep the pipeline filled. Depending on your application you can gain a bit of performance using this method, or actually lose performance. But it is nothing like having more real cores, especially in cache-intensive applications.
Don't worry, I have seen this confusion before. But only in amateurs.
. It's a Mac Pro Killer, anyways.
A high-end i7 based machine will never get close to a high-end Mac Pro, which is based on the Xeon processor, so it can have double the total cores, double the total cache, and double the memory channels per chip. One's desktop class, one's workstation class, there's just no competition. However, a high-end i7 will beat a single-processor low-end Mac Pro.