We got a nice 13 second speedup from the new BIOS; and overclocking the Conroe yielded a further 25 second speedup.
XviD
Unfortunately during the overclocking experiments the XVid installed on the benchmark drive got corrupted; so we don't have overclocked results for this test; however its interesting to see that the improved BIOS made an observable difference.
LAME MP3
The BIOS did not make much difference here... but oh my the overclocking did!