While the DPC3000 is now not a consideration I figured I would put up test results just in case anyone ever cares..
The speeds at 65Mb/s / 5.5Mb/s were identical. The 3010 might have edged out the 3000 every so slightly un upload speeds. I think this is because the Broadcom CPU is faster then the TI in the 3000 and therefore can do the cap rate limiting in a more nimble fashion. Simply the CPU can respond faster doing things like ACK.
The differences however are clear in latency and jitter. Mostly jitter.. I took 2 samples from Multiping and put them together for easy comparison. The 3010 clearly has less jitter which results in a lowered averaged latency. This shows 2 15 min long samples.
So the 3010 is better at a smoother connection with less jitter. This is important for gamers and maybe VoiP.
Ive now confirmed the above mods did make a difference, somehow I can get slightly higher upload speeds. Lower noise floor ? Who knows exactly. But before the mods I 100% of the time got 5.5Mb/s up and now I 100% of the time get 5.8 and sometimes as high as 6. Not that big a deal but surprizing considering the mods...
Now I await the SB6180. It will be fun to test that and see how that performs...
The test setup is:
PC connected directly to modem. No router. No other software execpt Multiping. Multiping set to 0.1 ping interval.
PC Intel i7 X990 @ 4.5Ghz 6 cores, ASUS Rampage Extreme IV motherboard, triple channel high performance ram, Adaptec SATA raid controller doing RAID 0 with 2 SSD drives. Intel MB based Ethernet - gigabit. Capable of wireline speed.
For large transfer tests I use a PC based router running Vyatta. The router is capable of 1 million packets per second and does wireline speeds with any packet larger then 128 Bytes.