Anyone here know anything about computers?

[northwind]

Put £-per-cycle (or 3DMark, or flop, or whatever) into that and the Mac doesn't look too happy though...

TBH, the Conroes are pretty ridiculously fast, there's very few applications that will use it. Gaming's more graphics-dependant, and even a fast singlecore Pentium or AMD will make a fair stab at video editing etc. So, fixating on how efficiently they're used in the Macs doesn't make much sense to me, I'd sooner have the cheaper PC and throw the money at upspeccing the monitor or graphics card. I'm yet to find anything my 2.8 pentium D can't cope with admirably, and most home users will be the same. It's certianly not the limiting feature for gaming, it's absurdly fast for web use, and it's reasonably quick at video editing. You could go a lot lower and still say the same.