Part of me still hopes it might be a Radeon 9700 pro deal, where it was released and was sucky due to some serious stability issues (my brother had one at the time and experienced this), then they realized that the card hated AGP fast writes for some reason (which they did fix with the 9800). Disable fast writes in the system BIOS and the card turned into a monster that completely caught nvidia off guard.

Not likely, but I'm still sort of hoping there is some flaw in the BIOS coding or whatever that is easily fixed, turning the CPU into a monster.

Vain hope? Probably.