Great not-so-highly rated players

Thank a lot PEP! 

Yes, Fire..., I get it. But it didn't help me regarding my initial question. 

PEP, does Houdini work at much higher kn/s rates than e.g. Stockfish? Stochfish only does about 1,500 kn/s on this silly machine.

You can't compare Kn/s across different engines. The speeds that they report don't seem to be comparable. I'll run stockfish now and post a piccy.

Nice! Can't wait to see it. 

Oh, could you try to run Stockfish from the start position, with the opening book and tablebases turned off. Then I'll do the same, for a proper comparison. 

Okay, take a look at this:

http://www.chess.com/votechess/game.html?id=21994&mv=19&san=Qe7

Houdini and Stockfish evaluate the same position on the same machine (pre-upgrade).

Notice that Stockfish reaches greater depth for less plies. Makes me wonder: is there different counting techniques involved or is Stockfish just less thorough (more aggressive pruning of the analysis tree)?

Don't know how to take a screenshot, but here are the numbers: 

Depth: 25 

Nodes: 196690K (1781 kn/s) 

Time: 110.41 s

Just open Arena, go to "Extras" and run the speed test.

Here's mine:

I don't have Arena. I'm using SCID, on an Apple computer. Could you try what I did, thanks! 

I just read Deep Blue did 200,000 kN/s. That's more than 100 times the machine I'm on right now. Still, I have a hunch Deep Blue didn't have a rating of 3.000+. If this is correct, then the kN/s value doesn't tell it all. Hm...

10,000+! Wow! That's not too sloppy. 

No of course not, Deep Blue would really struggle against my rig.

The sophistication of the software algorithms is paramount.

Short run.... 11, 500 more usual.

On this site, the CPU in my MacBook Pro scores 1,754. Incidentally, that's about the same as the kN/s rate. So, I'm guessing a CPU scoring about 10-12,000 in the PassMark, would run approx. as fast as your rig. Do you think this is correct? 

You are correct.

I downloaded the 30 day trial and ran the tests:

12734.8 puts me in third on that list of high end CPU's, behind only the two 2011 socket CPU's.

It should be noted that an unclocked i7 970 is twelfth on that list.

Cool. So, with a single Intel Core i7-3930K ($600), I should be able to run an engine at the same kN/s rate as your system. Right?

Or even better - if possible??? - I could smack two Intel Core i7-2600K's ($7-800) in my machine-to-be, and get something like 20,000+ on the CPUmark. Is this possible? 

Correct, that CPU is really good value.

Of course with a decent overclock, you could expect 30% more.