The guys at the TechReport give some love to the Black Edition, & by love, I mean they slap a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 on it, & see just how far they can push it.

"The Phenom 9600 Black Edition is a veritable enthusiast's playground if you know how to tweak it. We turned the knobs and dials on the Black Edition to see what we could get--assisted by a cooler the size of your head."

Seems that Phenoms don't heart them some Ubuntu so much... yet. The Phoronix guys have had some luck with the latest Hardy Heron build, & have posted some benchmark results.

"Fortunately though this support isn't stagnate and a better picture is painted when using the latest development builds of Ubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron' with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel."

At a TDP of 250 watts, Rock is going to be a beast in the heat department, but I guess a chip with sixteen cores running at 2.3GHz each would do that...

"While the chip will offer a total of 32 main instructional threads, it has also been equipped with two additional 'helper' threads that will not only pregrab instructions but also retire older instructions and clear the memory in order to speed up performance."