I'm not a big fan of most benchmarking tests - they tend to not reflect activities in the real world. For example, I don't know of anyone who would upgrade all of an enterprise's NT 4 servers to Win 2000 solely to increase Gigabit Ethernet throughput. Rather, in the real world, you'd want to know about aggregate throughput - daily, weekly, monthly, annually. Almost everyone agrees that Win 2000 is far more stable than NT 4. It certainly needs rebooting far less often.
Raw throughput is never the whole story.
Of course, neither is any other single factor. But you'll still be on safe ground if you first decide what you want your network to do in terms of applications and services, pick the best of each and only then decide on operating systems and server platforms. Virtual Quill is a writing agency serving the computer and networking industries. If your target customer doesn't know your product, doesn't know its uses and doesn't know he needs it, he's not going to buy it. From books to reviews, marketing to manuals, VQ can help you and your business.