They are faster for sure ......but I wouldnt pull out 2 good drives to buy em lol.
The only reason I replaced mine was because one was making some funny noise.

They are a bit louder as well.

They do have a rather distinctive sound. Sort of a sharp ping when the heads start searching. They're not the drives for a multi-media rig, that's for sure. But, if you like raw drive performance, they're the drives to have in the SATA world.

well, i seem to have hit the limit for 1.30v 300 x 9 =2700mhz. at 305 x 9 it fails orthos after about 2 1/2 minutes. core temps at 2.7 are 38 & 32 degreesC. idle temps 20 & 22C. now to see where it tops out. still haven't got the two core temps to even out. this thing blows me away. 2.7 with no voltage increase. couldn't get my 4800x2 past 2820 no matter how many volts i added. gotta love a cheap chip that oc's like this.

Looking good flyfisherman....these are some amazing chips for sure.

this is getting to be fun. currently 328 x 9 = 2952. vcore 1.475v. memory at 2.5-4-3-6 on the 183 divider. thanks for those settings wanna. am about 30 minutes into orthos with my core temps at 46 with an occassional bump to 48. gonna let orthos run awhile and then shoot for 3. beginning to think my problems with the 4800x2 had more to do with my inexperience with memory than the chip itself. getting the memory to work at high speeds is a lot more complicated than running up the cpu. but after reading through this thread i've gleaned enough info to get me headed in the right direction on my own. lots of good info in this thread. thank you very much

Bah.....sounds like you have it whooped bud.
Welcome to the 3GHz Dual Core Club

I know that not everyone has $150 bux layin around just to blow on something fun.
But if you do....
You really need to consider grabbing one of these 165 or 170 CCBBE Opterons while NewEgg has em.
They are a blast for their O/C potential and a nice solid CPU to sit on while
waiting for the "Quad Whatever Wars" to take place and the dust to settle.

i am now at 334x9=3006mhz. memory at 2.5-4-3-6 @2.7v. set vcore to 1.3125 + overvolt. temps at 49c. not quite stable. orthos fails after 5 minutes. she did 32m superpi in 25m06.625s. she did make it through 3dmark6 with a score of 9880, the best i've ever done. don't know whether to throw more voltage at it or bump the ram to 2.5-4-4-8. guess i'll play some more.

For the moment I would put the ram on a 166 divider just to see if your fighting the cpu or the ram.
Get my CPU O/C all worked out stable and then I can dial in the ram from there.

Another thing I have noted to I might mention.
When you clear the bios and reset it up, the first thing I do is go in and set Optimized defaults.
Then save and exit without making any other changes in the bios.
Then imediately go back in the bios and start making the needed changes for my setup.
Setting Optimized defaults makes several changes to options in the bios that would otherwise not get changed.
I find I have a much more stable board and things seem to work better that way.

thanks wanna, i'll try that

went with the 166 divider. ram at 2.5-4-3-6. 334x9=3006@1.5250v. failed orthos at 10 min 16 seconds instead of the usual 2minutes or so. temps are 51 with the occasional jump to 54. getting there. this is getting to be a challenge! got some stuff to take care of so i'll play with it some more this afternoon or evening.

i noticed everyone is using the 9x cpu multiplier on these opty's. i calculated using an 8x multi at 375=3gig ht multi at 3x and a 166 divider gives ht of 1125 mhz and 300 mhz ram. is there a reason nobody runs 8x?

375x8.......I have yet to see one of these boards that wil do 375 HTT.
Mine gets weird around 350. Merc tried it but I dont think his liked it either.

figured there was a reason. no i know why nobody uses 8x. thank you

I haven't had time to read this entire thread, but I'll try to do so today. I just wanted to post my initial observations with overclocking my CBBE 0615DPMW Opteron 170. I ran it at 280x10, 1.375 Vcore overnight, and it passed 10 hours of Orthos blend! 2.8 GHz with minimal effort is pretty awesome IMO. Temps seem to be maxing out at 48-49C at these settings according to CoreTemp. To take memory stability out of the picture, I used the 200 MHz (1/2) divider, putting the memory at 140 MHz.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to compromise with my memory settings, because once again there is some quirkiness with my Ballistix memory and the dividers on this board. However, now it is the 266 divider (2/3) that is unstable while the 333 (5/6) divider is perfectly stable, whereas the opposite was true with my Venice core and Deluxe board. Go figure, just when I could really use that 2/3 divider... So today I will be -*test*-('")ing 280x10 with RAM on the 5/6 divider, putting it at 234 MHz @ 2.8V with timings of 2.5-3-3-8 to be conservative. I really wish I could keep this RAM at or below stock given that I'm on my 4th set of Ballistix modules! I really don't want another dead module after 3-4 months. However, it looks like my options are to overclock by 35-50 MHz, or significantly underclock by using the 1/2 divider.

It seems weird you are having all this problem with the ram dividers.
Are you running the ram at Crucials specified 2.8v voltage?
Now with the same issues on a different CPU and Mobo. Its gotta be the ram.
I have run many different types of ram on these boards and never had such issues.

There is a lot of negative feedback about that ram dying at NewEgg.
Im afraid I would run it like I stole it and kill as many sets as I could.
Until they either sent me a set that wouldnt die, or refunded my money.

I know you just coughed up a buncha cash on a new CPU and mobo.
But you seriously need to get rid of that ram when you get a chance.
It sucking is taking all the fun out of the rest of your new "good" parts.