Have a 2600K up and crunching for a week now. If you intend to overclock, for sure the stock heatsink is not enough. I'm running at 4.5GHz and using a Scythe Mugen2 heatsink. I see temps hit 73 degrees when running 8 hyperthreads. On prime95 stress test, hits 78 degrees after 15mins.

As for the SATA ports recall, I'm not sure there's anything we can do since all boards are affected. If you return a board, you'll just have a CPU sitting there idle until replacement boards come in April.

The 3gbps SATA ports are supposed to fail after 2-3Y, and only with a 5-15% probability. Solution is simply to use the other ports. My Asus has extra ports from a Marvell controller - in the worst case still supports a total of 4 unaffected drives. Instead of replacing boards, a far cheaper solution would be to just give every affected user a free SATA card.

Just to say that I'm getting quite a bit less power draw for a 2600K system:
* 107 W at stock 3.5 GHz (at 100% load with eight WCGC threads)
* 130 W at 4.1 GHz (eight WCG threads)
* ~145 W at 4.1 GHz (eight Prime95 threads)

System details here, but the primary difference to Movieman's system seems to be a more efficient power supply and a low-power video card.

With 4.1 GHz and eight threads I get ~38,000 WCG PPD, or 54 GFLOPS (using the 700 WGC PPD = 1 GFLOPS conversion rate), compared to 24,000 PPD for an i7 920 @ stock.

An i7 980/990 Extreme or dual Xeon is still more powerful, but I could buy two 2600K systems for the cost of one i7 Extreme or entry-level dual Xeon.

I don't have full stats per project, just notes for the WUs returned in two 24-hour periods, both with the processor at 4.1 GHz.

The first 24h period used eight threads and a mix of all projects. (~38k WCG points, 47 WUs in 24h):

Project #WUs    CPU hours
              min  avg  max
C4CW     10   3.0  3.2  3.4
CEP2     10   3.0  5.2  8.8
DDDT      1        2.8
FA@H      3   3.0  3.6  4.6
HCC       1        1.0
HCMD     10   1.0  2.0  5.0
HFCC      7   1.8  4.3  7.8  
HPF       5   5.7  6.0  6.4

The second period used four threads and crunched C4CW and CEP2 exclusively (~29k WCG points, 38 WUs in 24h):

Project #WUs    CPU hours
              min  avg  max
C4CW     15   2.2  2.2  2.2
CEP2     23   0.8  2.6  4.8

No, it does not outperform a 980X, but can get to about 75%
That said, it is about 1/4 the purchase price and cheaper to run. They make for the best crunching systems right now.

this POV-ray benchmark was an interesting read thanks