I guess the reason why Opterons aren't as popular with the average user is the fact that they are targeted towards the server end. You see those advertised a lot in the media. I don't think there are any common benchmarks either as all I see are the 6600, 6800, 7800, x1000 series, the older x800 series, etc, benches. Imagine if AMD announced the new Opterons now available for PC gamers and designed for high performance machines. That would throw the Athlon 64's into the budget CPU category.