interesting, I forgot about that tool. I ran it on mine and got 5.9 on everything but calculations per second which was a 5.5.
Currently running stock settings on E8500 core duo 3.6GHz, 4GB Mushkin redline ddr2 (800?), Gigabyte x48 crossfire MB, and single DMM HD3870 video on Vista 32-bit.
With new sata hdd and rosewill 950w ps I spent just about a grand and using my old antec case and dvd-rw dl drive. plays ddo and war pretty decent so I’m happy.
Figure I’ll drop in the 2nd HD3870 around christmas. 8)
I only spent half that much. I used the Video card i allready had, and everything else came to a total of $500, and thats including a bunch of stuff I got for free from selling some stuff to Best Buy. So really I spent about $340. I was going to get a Q6600, but I really think It wouldnt of been as fast as this processor.
I also bumped the FSB up to 1800Mhz, which I had to do considering the processor had a locked multiplyer.
BTW the E8500 is 3.16, not 3.6Ghz.
Edit : I meant 3.16Ghz.
That is a good find.
I paid $1,500 for my desk top and it’s an AMD Athlon 64 @2.4ghz 2 gigs ram and a 256mb Nvidia card FX5500 the memory on the video card is very slow so its not the amount of ram that’s important, its the speed.
I let my wife talk me out of an alienware system 3 years ago to “support HP stock” that we don’t even own, my in-laws do. This purchase ultimately cause me to retire from PC gaming 100%. I got fed up with the poor performance.
Ouch. But $1500??? 
My old pc had almost the same specs but was worth almost nothing…
When did you buy this? maybe this was a long time ago when that stuff was expensive?
Sorry, I lost a digit in there somewhere. 
Yeah, it was about three years ago. The base unit was about $1,200 but after the upgrades it bumped it up to $1,500. The system was cheaper than the Alienware at near the same specs but the speed of the memory ect… was something I was not aware of at the time. The GPU on the graphics card was another problem as was the PSU so upgrading to a faster video card was a no go as well. Most video cards I wanted took a minimum of 400w PSUs and mine was only 350w I thought about getting a 500w PSU but then there was the proprietary issue with HP computer cases.
So i dont understand, how could it be 5.5? Mine was 5.7 at stock speeds, Which is 3.0Ghz, and yours is faster.
Well, better luck next time! 
yeah I don’t know either. I am pretty much using everything the way it came out of the box and auto-setup. Perhaps there is something in the BIOS I should look into… I will have to do some research about the different settings and see if anything should be tweaked. I know the memory can be run faster than what it has defaulted to, heck the guy on the mushkin forum basically said what settings to use for the board, so that is probably as good a place to start as any.
I disabled this setting in my BIOS called “Enhanced Halt State” or something like that, and what it does is it decreases the CPU multiplyer. with that enabled, my CPU goes down to 2400Mhz. If enabled, you should disable it.