Having just acquired some new hardware at work, I decided to do some tests to see how well this system would run. Here are the specs of the system running the benchmark:

• Supermicro X7DA3+ MB w/Intel 5000X (GreenCreek) chipset
• (2) Intel Xeon Quad-Core E5450 (3.00GHz/1333FSB/2x6MB) CPU
• 3Ware Escalade 9650SE-16ML PCI-E 256MB w/16 PORTS + BBU
• (8) Kingston 2GB PC2-5300 DDR2-667MHz FB ECC CL5 (16GB)
• (12) Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s Hard Drive (RAID 50 array)

To test it out I installed FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE AMD64. Install completed flawlessly, so it was time to do some compiling.
A vanilla make buildworld: 48 minutes
Not bad.. but not amazing either. So I decided to do some threaded compiles to stress the system a little bit. Since it’s an 8 core system, I used the following:

time -h make -j8 buildworld

The resulting time of: 12m 33s was nothing short of impressive.
Following up with a:

time -h make -j8 buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC

Resulted in: 52s
Quite impressive.