thinking about Haswell desktop

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

My current desktop is old (Core 2 Quad Q6600).  Not bad, but I'm thinking 
about a new system.  I guess that I can expect double the processing 
speed.

Some tentative thoughts.

AMD isn't in the game, unless you focus on bang for the buck.

If I'm going to live with a new system indefinitely (perhaps longer than 5 
years if innovation continues to be slow), I might want to get more things 
right.

Reducing 24/7 power usage would seem worthwhile.  The Intel processors 
with "S" suffix save some power and are not too expensive or slow.

It would be nice to have ECC.  Seems to require XEON :-(  More expensive 
processor, more expensive motherboard, more expensive RAM.  I'm ignoring 
this direction initially.

VT-d (for PCI bus virtualization) would seem nice.  Sadly, VT-d support is 
a complex mess:

- not available on K suffix Haswell processors.  That's OK, there are a 
  lot of other features missing on K suffix processors that make me not 
  want them.

- most LGA 1150 chipsets (i.e. Haswell-supporting) can support VT-d, but 
  many BIOSes don't.  Only Q87-chipset motherboards seem to be good bets;  
  there are not a lot of them.  What a silly, stupid situation.

- see <http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2326402>

Any thoughts / hints?
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