Alright, so we built our cloud testbed box with the sexy processor despite the whole world around us saying “Forget AMD, go for Intel”.
Here’s the configuration
Processor: AMD Phenom II X2 550 (darn, I did not find the black edition)
Motherboard: Gigabyte MA74GMT-S2
RAM: 4GB DDR3 (ripped off from a lenovo machine)
Harddisk: 500GB Seagate Barracudda 7200rpm
This was perfectly running stable @3.1Ghz until one day I noticed the OS boot time go drastically slow.
Lot of investigation on memory and cpu usage brought up that the CPU had defaulted to 800Mhz per core.
Over-clocking in the BIOS was just not helping (Tried till 3.8Ghz) ; the CPU would go back to 800Mhz once you exit the BIOS.
After experimenting virtually every setting in the BIOS for 3 days, including updating the BIOS to latest rev, I found that “AMD Cool and Quiet” setting had kicked in somehow !!!
Disabled “AMD Cool and Quiet” and set the CPU Clock to default speed and it finally is back running @3.1Ghz; Hurray!!!
I just hope I dont have to worry about the Temperature parameters 
