theInquirer was able to have some time with a Barcelona chip recently. It was paired with 4GB of memory and two Radeon HD 2900XT. The chip ran at 2.5GHz stock and they overclocked it to 3GHz. The two Radeon cards were overclocked to 830MHz for the core and 900MHz for the memory.
When they ran 3DMark06 on the system without an overclock they were able to score 23,768. After the overclocked it came to 30,031.
Barcelona is coming out to be quite the performer and I can’t wait for the chip to come out. I’m, of course, more excited about Phenom a month or two afterwards but Barcelona is going to tell us what to expect from Phenom.
Another thing found out by theInquirer is that AMD Barcelona has a few GB/s of memory bandwidth more then any Intel offering which is GREAT. Especially since Barcelona is on DDR2-800 and is still faster then any DDR3 offering. AMD seems to be smart in this transition from DDR2 to DDR3 like they were with the transition from DDR to DDR2. DDR3 doesn’t yet have any advantage over DDR2 except for the marketing benefits of having a larger number in its name.