Wow, thank you for the very thorough response! And thanks for finding the Rev B part number for the LCD cable . The orginal is somewhat hard to come buy and is almost 2x the price.
I am contemplating processor swaps now. I am between the X5650, 5660, 5675. I can find the X5660 and X5660 for between $110 and $130 /pair. The X5675 pairs run about $50 more than that on the low end.
I am somewhat partial X5675 as its a year newer with higher clock speed, however I bought the machine to run VMware Workstation as a home lab to start learning pentesting so I am not sure the higher clock speed is worth the extra money when I am really only after more cores.