No matter what market Corsair has branched into, it has offered reliable products and customer service to match! A company for all seasons ;)
My current rig is sporting one of their PSUs 8GB of Corsair memory and one of their (smaller) SSDs.
Speedfan shows 45/46 degrees, 65 under load (prime95). The RAM however is REALLY hot when it isn't even doing anything, one stick is hotter than the other.
Hey there, just built a machine with an PII X4 965 BE and the temps in BIOS with the stock cooler is 53 degrees. That seems a tad high, just wanted to get verification on that.
For the calcs I would probably go with the 3930k. You could always throw in an SSD or SAS Drive later.
That said, many get by on less. If the calcs etc are taking far longer than you want them to then upgrade, if you don't care then just get the SSD.
AFAIK you can disable cores in the BIOS, check to see if some are off or if there is any sort of power gating feature that might be getting in the way.