Ward,
I remember you saying that your SATA performance was low on this board. Have you ever tried uncommenting the soft_reset in cache_as_ram_auto.c?
That makes it so that the HyperTransport links all run at 200 MHz 8-bit instead of 1 GHz 16-bit (factor of 10 difference in bandwidth)
The unfortunate thing about HyperTransport is that you can't tell if it's running at speed from the lspci. The new values are there, but only take effect at the next soft reset.
Thanks, Myles