I've just bought my Opty for it's perfect overclockability and it's wonderful stability
It was socket 939 opteron 144 and that looks real great , and technically I'm doing everything with my computer
i do hate intel it's chipsets , cpu's technologies etc...
but believe me i'm not a newbie , i've changed my memory i've relaxed my timings i've done everything that i've ever could
but my computer always crashed after 2-3 days of working (i mean nonstop working like downloading torrents doing some sort of Prime95 etc....) i've tried all versions of my mobo bios even the beta ones and that doesn't helped me , my processor was supercool i've tried Gskill , Twinmos , Kingstone and non of them helped me even a little
and noone have ever told that gigabyte DQ6 had an issue with 6600
'bout ICH8R i can say it's the worst that i've ever seen i've got my Raid array on nVIDIA board without problem for more than a year
but in 6 months i've lost my data 2 times!!!

and about the memory controller
that's not that matter i know but there's something who's matter and that's that it's not just memory controller as you know amd beside integrating memory controller integrated North bridge with the processor as well and the fact that i've figured out(I haven't heard from reliable sources it's just my experience) is that while you're reading something from CD-rom ,hard drive etc... the system became some sort of laggy with intel processors while amd isn't
i've known some people who've managed to OC 6300 to more than 3.5 GHz but they still got the same problem believe me until intel moves to integrated memory controller nothing will change. the performance rightnow is not such important for me the important thing is stability whom it seems like i won't get it soon enough with intel as you can see with the thomshardware latest stability test (which was netburst stability) you may understand , i'm sure that it's still the same !!!!
you're free to think that i'm racist . that's right, cause i'm really am
i'm not telling you amd got better performance in gaming etc... but i'll tell you it's better in real world performance at least for me

K8L will beat every1
believe me!!!