I believe the strange results which showed Phenom beating much faster QX9770 systems on the Overclockers club review were caused by a rather annoying BIOS bug on the X38/X48 based boards. Basically the PCI-E 2.0 sometimes does not allocate full bandwidth to a PCI-E 2.0 card.
There is a thread on this forum here.
Basically the fixed BIOSes Improve performance of PCI-E 2.0 cards which use a lot of the bandwidth
Core2 is much better than Phenom at the same clock and most Core2's are faster clocks than Phenoms so this whole debate is a non issue.
John