Thank you Gavric for a good article but I would kindly disagree with the final conclusion : that AMD will return to the high end only when Bulldozer comes online. I think that there are some and will be more and more applications that take advantage of the multicore CPUs and, with the launch of AMD hexa-core CPUs coming soon, I see AMD returning to the high-end especially in the CAD and scientific workstation market and maybe in the gaming market if more games like Resident Evil will come out , games that really scale up while using more cores. There is unfortunately an area where AMD will not be able to beat Intel: single threaded performance. That's because Intel has Turbo and AMD does not. Also Intel's IMC is much much better than AMD's . Remember, AMD's IMC is related to, the almost a decade old, Irongate. Intel' on the other hand is so good that while being off chip it still gets a bandwidth that's very close to AMD's IMC bandwidth. Take that great memory controller and integrate it in a CPU and you have a monster. But, in the multithreaded market, AMD will probably be a very tempting buy.

I would like to point out that your comment about the other platforms 'not letting overclocked processors lower their core voltage in idle mode if it has been increased during overclocking'
is not necesarily true.

This depends on the motherboard used in the test. Some will lower the voltage (even if it has been raised to overclock) and some won't. This is true with both AMD and Intel S775 platforms.

This is also an important bit of information I look for when reading motherboard reviews.
Cheers!

One thing is certain ,AMD is on right direction with this OC potential ,so go ahead AMD ,even Intel fan boy support you ,expect lower price for their Nehalem.

my AMD PII 940 is Quite warm (60c)even at 3Ghz (default) bet that thing was cooking at 4Ghz (full Folding@home load)

you have to be mad to have CnQ off under norm use (not constant full load and defo not the AMD heatsink the Blue Orb II i got fitted on there just about holding on)

i did not see any temps

Please note that with Phenom 2, specially at those speeds you really want NB to hit at least 2600. Makes a LOT of difference in performance.
Regards

Well, I hope one day you get to test with NB2600...any Phenom overclocker knows that you are handicapping the processor running at 4Ghz but only using 2400 NB...all phenoms will at least do 2600...2800 is harder and 3000 is extremely difficult but up to 4Ghz , 2600 NB should be enough and makes for a very good difference in performance.
As it stands, your OCed portion of this article is very flawed.
Regards