A great man and someone I always admired.
Not because he was the first to climb Everest but because of his work with the people there in the later years of his life.
He used his name to generate the funds to build schools and hospitals for those people.
Sorry to go off topic but he is IMHO a very special person who needs to be remembered for all that he did not just climbing Everest.

... here is where overclocking comes into play ... typically you need to pump more vCore into the 860 than a 920 to get to 4 GHz which is where you start getting close to the end of the line for air cooling. The increased vCore ends up pretty much washing out the power savings. The other thing is that pretty soon (March or so) you can get a hexcore that will fit the same socket as the 920 (1366) but not the 860 (1156). If you are not going to overclock, or perhaps go for a relatively minor adjustment then the 860 is definately the better route. Not only do you get power savings but you typically can get the MOBO cheaper. Some of the other components may be cheaper also because you do not need as much power (buy a lower rated PSU) and if you do want an aftermarket cooler that also will be cheaper because you will not be trying to dissapate quite as much heat. You also should only get 4 GB ram for an 860 whereas on a 920 you would typically get 6GB.

I originally got the i7-920 because I knew I could put an i9 into the system, but I did not think the power consumption would be so high – it is as high as one of my quads with a big GPU. I need to replace other systems anyway, so I could sort of sit on the fence a bit; get the i7-850, test it and then decide if I want to keep it and sell the 920, or keep both and use the 850 to replace one or both of my other systems (the Q9400 or Phenom II 940 perhaps). The Q9400 has a GTS250 that sucks up too much juice, and does less GPU work than the GTX 260sp216 in the Phenom system.

Dual skt systems often mean you save on power when compared to two single skt systems. That said the dual skt system I have sits on the shelf because it needs 2 PSU's, the processors are only dual core! Although I could pick up 2 quads, they are expensive and an i7 would do more work.

As much fun as I'm having with this system I just found out that I may be getting a system to "play" with for a few weeks that may make the computational power of this look like school girls jumping rope in a schoolyard..
Can't say too much more now but does anyone have a 1200w PSU I can borrow? And maybe 24 sticks of DDR3-1333? LOLOL

After much consideration of output v price, I ended up buying a Pogo Linux 5u server. It has 8 sockets, which accommodate dual core opteron 64s. So far, I have $90 into it, and all I need now is some RAM and CPUs!

Happy Crunching All!