I think the main attraction to the Opterons besides price is the fact that they have the large cache as well as running at lower voltages. Most people I have talked to can get somewhere between 2.4 and 2.5 GHz from a 170 with stock voltage and factory heatsink.

Strangely my Opteron 170 is running 100 MHz slower than my 3700+, both with 1 MB cache, yet it is getting the same integer and floating point speeds.

Not sure how accurate the BOINC benchmarks are but to compare machines they should work ok. My 3700 isn't running on there at the moment but it was getting the same numbers within about 20 pts.

http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cp...?hostid=163742

Here is a comparison of his machines speed.

http://bbc.cpdn.org/hosts_user.php?u...778&show_all=1

Keith