Conclusions
Based on what we saw from our Phenom 9600 Black Edition, I wouldn't expect to see astounding overclocks out of these chips—at least not all of them. Of course, overclocking headroom is never a sure thing, and you might have more success than we did. Never know.

I wouldn't count on it, though.

With the apparently limited headroom in the Phenom at present, having an unlocked multiplier isn't exactly a huge advantage. Happily, however, AMD isn't charging extra for the Black Edition, and street prices between the vanilla Phenom 9600 and the Black Edition are roughly equal at around $259. Heck, the Black Edition is down to $239 at Newegg. Given that, if you're going to buy a Phenom, this is definitely the one to grab.

Here are the things on my wish list from AMD: more clarity on how to disable the TLB workaround if you want to and broader, better-documented Phenom support for legacy Socket AM2 motherboards—especially those based on Nvidia chipsets, which are almost surely the majority of the enthusiast-class motherboards in existing systems. I'd also like to see a utility for disabling the workaround that would work with non-AMD-chipsets. If we had those things, I think the Black Edition could be a tempting upgrade for a lot of Athlon 64 X2 owners who don't want to bother with the hassle of a motherboard swap or an OS installation in order to get quad cores. Without them, today's Phenoms are in a tough spot in a tremendously competitive environment.