That's quite sad. Now I just want to see when the first OEM K10 system is up for grabs and if that suffers from the same problems. Its kinda obvious K10 is not in platform stability mode yet. Whether its the chip, MB, BIOS, can't really tell from here.

Worst thing is, everyone can get differing results and not know if the results are accurate, underperforming 1%, or by 500%.

s7e9h3n: Is there any way to underclock the CPUs through BIOS? If you do that, like to 1.5GHz, would they run?
I'm thinking maybe the earlier chips have clock instabilities here. That's usually how a failed overclock reacts.

Ahh well, let me make note of a few related things I've seen around, just to show you what can happen. Just be careful that these server benchmarks vary very widely depending on how optimized you tune the software running (and in this case, your BIOS/CPU rev)

Techreport benching: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13176/4
Quote Originally Posted by Opteron 2347-2350
These first chips run at rather low clock frequencies, with even lower memory controller/L3 cache speeds.
Anandtech benching: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3091&p=5

Specjbb2005
TR: Dual Opteron 2350 (2GHz) = 88949 Bops
AT: Dual Opteron 2350 (2GHz) = 70363 Bops
TR: Dual Xeon E5345 (2.33GHz) = 87718 Bops
AT: Dual Xeon E5345 (2.33GHz) = 68303 Bops

Get me? And the SPEC submitted results are usually higher than these, especially for Xeons they are submitted as the authors mention, with all tweakings and so on.