Well, it has been quite a long time I read THG guides, and I really am sorry to admit that the quality of the reviews are dropping.
I have good knowledge of cpu architectures (I work with and develop for HPC for 8 years), and I cannot agree with the conclusions of your last reviews of the Phenom processor. I thought you guys were "impartial", but taking all Phenom's reviews only lead to a tendency in favor of the current Intel offering.
First of all, in any of your articles is emphasised that each implementation of the x86 made by Intel or AMD has its own strengths and weakness, and that, despite these being multi-purpose cpus, each is best at doing certain tasks. All you say is that Intel's implementation is "unbeatable" today.
This said, I ask you: did you guys know that AMD's implementation is quite better than Intel's for a cluster in which scalability is desired? That an integrated memory controler can make better use of the available memory bandwidth?
So, if you guys think you know hardware and cpu architecture, didn't you notice anything strange with the synthetic benchmark for the Phenom with Sandra?? How can a Phenom have slower memory performance than every Intel quad in this sort of benchmark? Didn't you feel uncornfortable at the time of writing that, or it was, in fact, lack of knowledge?
Please, refer to your coleagues at http://legitreviews.com/article/597/4/ and http://legitreviews.com/article/617/1/ to read a "pretty print" version of what I am saying. You guys messed up here.
I think you should change your conclusions to something like: "we test a variety of simple tasks of a home user who might be interested in these cpus, and the most suitable or best performing for these is..." without quoting a dubious title of "unbeatable", "champion" or "king". Any cpu you point as that can be beaten by some other brand in some task you guys might not even imagine. And let's not forget that a certain cpu cannot be the best for someone who cannot buy it.
Note that by doing so, you can't complain that so many forum members waste their times uselessly "fighting" one another because Intel or AMD "is the best".
I expect more professional and impartial articles from THG, or if it is not the case, please, make it clear that you are not trying to be impartial. I really like your previous material, the interactive charts are great, site layout, news, etc.. So, the quality of the texts must be as great, not inferior.