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Overclocking is never gauranteed based on a stepping. It just can give you a good idea of what you might expect. The good steppings are CABYE and CABNE, the bad is CABGE.
cabne 054x ussually can hit 2.8-2.9 pritty easily from waht i have seen, but might be a little harder to get 3 (more volts) and overclocking cant be completely based on steppings its the luck of the draw
Settings and rig specs would be awesome. My CABNE 0530 is sitting at 2.75ghz with 1.4v. My main point of curiousity is your ram, and the timings you are running on it.
i have the 144 CAB2E 0540 fpmw which i have at 9x300 @.1.35 x113% (1.48approx)
ram does 245mhz 2-2-2-7 @3.3vdimm 166mhz divider.
temps for that is around 42C on stock cooler
i have done 311x9 at same vcore but temps were almost hitting 50C and i still need to see if my ram will hit 254mhz. if not 233mhz with the 150mhz divider it is.
man opterons are fun.
EDIT: oh yea actually i can get away at like 1.43vcore but for the sake of my memory controller thing that cfeclipse linked me to about high vdimm damaging cpu if it has low vcore.
My CABNE (don't remember week I'm afraid) does 2.95 @ 1.38v and 3.0 @1.42v. I've gotten it up to 3.2 with much higher volts (between 1.6 and 1.65), but temps creaped above 50c (using water). I'm pretty happy with my current speed.
The memory controller however I wasn't quite as happy with. I can only do 270-280 on my Ballistix where on my friends CABYE I can do up to 290 stable albeit his proc maxes out around 2.9. It also required a bit more tweaking of the timings and settings with my CABNE than on his.