[citation][nom]gallesol[/nom]There are some of us who who receive a great deal of disconfort thinking of Intel as the only microprocessor manufacturer around. If for no other reason than to maintain some competition in this critical industry, please include an AMD based system.[/citation]
Unfortunately, these are "bang for the buck" builds and while AMD typically saves money, their products also often reduce performance. This is especially a concern since most of our benchmarks, just like real world users would expect, are limitted to the number of threads they support. Further, overclocking simply burries AMD under Intel.
Tom's hadn't the opportunity to try the new AMD cores, and these certainly weren't available in retail when the article was set up. The same goes for Core i7, which was released the middle of this month while the articles were set up the end of last month.
Remember that yours is just one voice, and imagine the flood of responses had Tom's used a slow AMD processor that didn't overclock well and relied on 3 or 4 thread apps to beat Core 2 Duo, with these dual-thread and single-thread benchmarks.