Aw

Should I have gone with the Quad-Core 3.GHZ instead?
It totally depends what you wanna do. The basic idea is that
more_cores = horsepower (think tugboat)
core_speed = snappiness (think jet ski)
When I was rendering 3D a lot and compositing multi-layer 2k and 4k video (also a kind of rendering) I wanted as many nodes as possible. Now that I'm only casually editing photographs (3,000 per month), gaming, web surfing, and watching video (for research) I want the fastest cores. Thus for me I'll probably overclock a 6-core i7 Hackintosh or something. For horsepower you can calculate generally
core_speed x core_number = total horsepower
So in the i7 case it's (4.5GHz x 6 = 27GHz) and single threaded apps and RAM access will be at 4.5GHz (so snappy). With the 12 core you can use the same formula to see what ya got. What's the clock speed on your 12-core anyway?