It's a little less snappy than an Opty 939 at those frequencies. But... board features have improved, it's way cooler than any opty I ever had as measured from anywhere using a real thermal probe and it was less than 200 bucks for processor and board shipped.... In terms of performance over all the unit feels really good and I'm quite pleased with the memory bandwidth (11G/s). The PWM area on the board is not cooled with anything , but with the unit folding full blast it doesn't really get hot - you can stick your fingers on the PWM area and leave them there... big diff from my DFI NF4 days. I teamed it up with a 3870 and the performance is very nice. It's like a budget gaming rig that actually delivers. The 3870 cost as much as the CPU/BOARD/RAM put together. In terms of vs C2D you need about 300-400 Mhz over a C2D to put up similiar performance. So it's a fair match with guys running up to around 3Ghz C2D's. As far as what to choose, I've been able to run Pi at 3.5Ghz and could probably stabilize it, but I want the higher FSBs and lower temps so stopped at 3250MHz for 24/7. (all on air mind you and software monitor never reads over 40c in the case)

I've heard KTE grumbling about 770 based boards, but real world testing isn't backing up his data for me. It's cool, it's stable and it was as cheap as a lady of the night having a Sunday sale.

This whole scenario might be entirely different with a Phenom, but Phenom isn't value for money in my opinion. If I was buying a quad it would be Intel, hands down.