>and I know the risks of using a non-release version, but I like having a little more bleeding-edge.
You don't need this kind of bleeding edge, it's sometimes a must with Linux to get the lastest software, which depends on the lastest kernel, running but in $BSD there isn't such an influence. So yes it's nice to have the latest drivers and so on, but you usually want usable drivers too ;-) So in my opinion FreeBSD 7 stable (RELENG_7) is the way to go. There you will get quality to some degree but also the latest MFCed code.
>How does FreeBSD do on dual-cores? Will it effectively use both cores?
Yes FreeBSD 7 scales rather good while using multiple cores.
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http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scal...%20Preview.pdf <--