Hate to burst anyone's bubble, but that "downgraded from" stuff is pure speculative (IMHO) BS.
CPU chips aren't made for different speeds - they're all made off of the same line, and tested. Certain chips will go to higher speeds (at certain voltages), and those are "binned" to higher speed grades. The only time that a CPU chip is "downgraded", is if there is a market demand for a lower speed grade, when there are only higher speed grades in stock at the mfg. In that case, yes, they will remark them, but they won't put that information right on the front of the chip in human-readable/decodable form, and if they were remarked, then they should hit those higher speed grades literally effortlessly (no vcore adjustments).
But given the number of reports of: a) not being able to hit the supposedly "original" speed grade, even with additional vcore, and b) some numbers in that field being wildly out of range of AMD's current and planned CPU speed grades (numbers in the 60+ range), the theory (completly unsubstantiated if you read the original thread that it was taken from - it was invented by some kid in Singapore or Malaysia, I think) just doesn't make sense.
(For an example of a "true" "downgraded" CPU, consider the original 0.25 2.0v PII-300 SL2W8 stepping. Those chips (nearly 99% of them), would do 450Mhz, without any vcore adjustment, just change FSB speed and go. Since comparable PII-350 and PII-400 chips of the same era had difficulty reaching 450Mhz stable, rumor/legend has it that these chips were originally planned on being 450Mhz chips. However, the "true" 450Mhz PII chips, had a modified heatspreader compared to all of the other PII speed grades. So perhaps they were planned to be sold as 450s, but Intel chose to re-design the heatspreader for better cooling at that speed, and then sold those "original" 450 chips as 300s, simply by changing the default FSB speed detected at the Slot-1 edge-connection. But *no-where* on the chips is there any external marking that would indicate that they were "downgraded". That sort of information is only kept internally by the CPU mfg, if at all, and only xref-able by the lot/fab/production-run numbers, which is what I suspect that entire number field is for on the AMD CPUs, not some "downgraded from" speed grade.)
The only thing that gave this vicious internet rumor any sort of credibility whatsoever, is that AMD XP chips often overclock (given some additional vcore) to real-Mhz speeds, approaching or in some cases surpassing their "XP-speed rating", which in the BIOS often shows an XP-speed rating of nearly what those speculative "downgraded from" numbers show (since the most common numbers in that field seem to be 26 or 28).
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