The rumors regarding the CPUs that some overclockers had and the others AMD used in their demonstrations were cherry-picked samples is looking more and more possible now.
We have a total of 3 Phenom II's here, two 940s and one 920.
On air our best 940 did 3.89GHz "fully stable" ( 6 hours prime95 ), our second 940 did 3.77GHz "fully stable" ( 5 hours prime95 ) and the 920 stopped at 3.71GHz "fully stable" ( 6 hours prime95 ) and benchable at 3.95GHz, would rarely pass SuperPi 1M at 4G on air.
We're done testing the second 940 on LN2, nothing to write home about, 5.5GHz benchable.
We're going to take another break now and grab some more pizza to eat
Then we're going to give the other 940 a try with LN2.
Another person that I know and trust has also tested another retail 940 ( he works with a hardware distributor ) on LN2 and maxxed out at 5.4GHz ( stable in 3D Marks, PC Marks, CineBench 10, SuperPi 32M, wPrime, etc ) and ran some light benches ( SuperPi 1M, Hexus PiFast ) at 5.52GHz.
the thing about that i7 being faster in this test is still the HT actually working in one thing the same will happen with video editing etc but tests that don't utilize HT will be much more effective in showing the "true" differences between these tests
If I for example run Video Editing and Encoding programs, and time is valuable to me, I'd pick a Core i7, it's simply faster, with and without HT.
Of course if the tasks that I'll be running benefit from HT I will enable it, any reason I should not ?
In reality, if our budget allows us to buy the best CPU we grab it, if our budget is limited we take a look at our options, compare them in tasks that we usually do and pick the most suitable one.
We're about to receive some Octo-Core Bloomfields ( Core i7, 8 cores, 16 threads ) E.S. what is AMD going to do about it ? Hm... don't know to be honest.
Life ain't fair, and if you're going to compare something you use all of its features if they're beneficial to you