So far all the reviews have shown Barc with worse latency to main memory than the 2.6 GHz Opteron running the same registered ddr2-667 . I think somethings screwy with these preview benchmarks using es barcs, the nda isn't over yet, I'm still waiting for final reviews, that will show up I suppose in 4-48 hrs. Looks like something's up with the L3 cache or BIOS/drivers, which isn't working like it should. In any case, I don't expect a large increase in performance but mainly the large mem footprint apps like games and media encoding/decoding and some rendering should see a boost.