Don't judge the K10 by the benches seen at Tech-Report and Anandtech.

There is strong evidence suggesting that the chips used in those reviews, were bug ridden.

According to Dave Graham over at AMD Zone who has connections with AMD:

i've been asked to pass this to my FAE @ AMD.

what people have been benching is the B1 chip stepping with a BIOS patch applied to get around errata #281 (conspicuously absent on that errata worksheet). BA is the production stepping that fixes this issue on the NB itself and will handle some of the performance "issues" people have been ing about. B2 steppings are the "SE" or higher rated parts.

cheers,

dave
I knew something had to be wrong with those benches! The SSE performance in particular, was just too low considering the K10's enhancements in that area.