This post is missing the "I design and build my own top tier gear" option.

Dibs on the BRM V16.

Please don't give them any more ideas.

Because it's cheaper than having 2 equally good machines, and quicker to switch between windows which are far apart compared to a conventional quad-head setup.

Missing option: one machine, four monitors, two keyboards, two trackballs. It's essentially two independent dual-head setups run off one machine.

If your render jobs sit in userspace cranking away, doing very few syscalls, then the OS differences should not affect the numbers significantly.

You mean how the "capacitors" are just etched parallel wires and the silicon is used as the dielectric?

Not just parallel-plate capacitances exist, there are also significant junction capacitances. Reverse biased PN junctions, basically diodes, are used to isolate the individual devices from the substrate; every reverse-biased diode is also a (nonlinear) capacitor.

SRAM also has parasitic capacitances within each cell, which could act enough like DRAM to enable it to hold some data without power. The DRAM capacitors are essentially parasitics as well, so don't disregard the parasitic capacitance in an SRAM cell as completely insignificant.

swap_size = min(2gb, max(512mb, phyram * 2))

With more than 2gb your machine will surely crawl due to massive disk storms, with less than 512mb the Linux VM may not be happy (sometimes it just HAS to swap or go to the oom-killer). 512mb is probably overkill to prevent that scenario, but that's what I use.