So what is the consensus here, should we be concerned about late machines that also underperform?
Speculating about what the timing and numbers behind the latest news release mean by a bunch of yahoos like us isn't going to produce much. I'll bite, though. I'm guessing this was a guy taking a little time out of the normal stress testing electronics go through:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_operating_lifeKNC probably skimped on this a little, and thus had failure rates higher than consumers are used to. (It's super rare an off-the-shelf motherboard has capacitors that burn). The ambient temperature of 55C seems a bit strange to me, but it's quite possible a temperature sensor on the board is seeing this, or they're trying to operate the chips at higher than normal operation (e.g. 125C). I wouldn't want a firmware released that can permanently fry the chips, or rather, I'd like to know where the 'risk zone' is with respect to temperature, voltage, current, etc.
As for the hash rate, one thing I noticed was that there are zero reported hardware errors in the screenshot. Granted, it's only 60s of hashing and it's most likely the software not reporting things; or, more optimistically, they're really underclocked.
They know every week counts. They're in this for the long haul (they hope to be "the Intel of bitcoin" in Iyengar's words).
