I still think there is something to be said for a MP 1.1 tho if you do the CPU upgrade its on par with a i7 machine...plus you will have proper resale value after a couple of years where the i7 machine will be lucky if its 1/3 of its value...
I've got both an upgraded 1,1 (2x4 2.66 cores with 12 Gig memory and solid state boot and RAIDed main drives) and a i7 3.4 Ghz Sandy Bridge PC (that I purchased just so I could finally use top graphics cards for entertainment - and be able to upgrade them when I want). I couldn't help doing some benchmarking though and I can tell you there is a hell of a lot of difference in performance (in processing batches of RAW still images that I think isn't far off the demands of video editing). With just 4 cores on the i7 it was over twice as fast at processing the images but even more significant was how fast the images were read (which I think is more to do with the bandwidth and memory speeds). It takes a couple of minutes to read a 100 raw files on my 1,1 using CS5 (to get them to the point that I can go through them and edit them) but the same process is almost instantaneous on the i7.
On anther point. I tested turning hyperthreading off in the bios on the i7 and noticed that it made absolutely no difference in the time it took to process the raws. Only one test I know but I'm starting to get the feeling that hyperthreading is just a marketing concept similar to when camera manufactures used to upscale images within the camera and then market them as having more pixels!!
