Quote Originally Posted by Alien Grey View Post
The CPU can only calculate what it receives and clearly there's some kind of slowdown and the outcome is bad.
Nothing to do with MB/BIOS.

OS (and apps) decide which core to execute at; apps dictates how large the working set is.
If the working set is too large or the task scheduling is screwed, performance will become miserable.(two simple reason of performance drop)

Quote Originally Posted by Alien Grey View Post
Clock for clock you should have better GFlops than my Q9650@4.05GHz that gives me 57+ GFlops. The score should be 1 or 2 GFlops better with a Quad.you get better results than using all available free memory.
HT decreases Linpack GFlops by a lot.
Nehalem delivers higher GFlops than Penryn with HT off.