Those are all synthetic's though. How about some running some Ht-enabled encoders and some Single-threaded encoders + Heavy net use and Single threaded encoders + Playing (with whatever player you use) a dvd ripped onto a hard disk on a seperate channel from the drive you are encoding from/to?

The simple matter for this thread is that 4ghz is far from easy. You say you hit it, but your stock vcore max (if I understand you correctly) was 3.73ghz. Obviously you weren't too interested in your air max, since you're going to be PC'ing it 24/7, and you've said you aren't a Prime-er, so even if you hit 4ghz, you can't really say that it was 100% stable. I'd wager the best you can say is that it was benchmark stable. Which with the complexity of dual cores combined with the heat concerns of this processor isn't enough to point to it as stable in my opinion. Also, so far you are the only person I've seen to even claim to personally have hit 4ghz stable on air. Whereas I've seen 2 people who failed as much with water, 4 who failed as much on air, and about half a dozen who only couldn't get 4.5ghz stable on single stage. Even if you can get 4ghz completely stable, you must conceed that isn't enough to advise someone to purchase the same chip on the expectation of the same.

A much bigger thread would address the memory bandwidth issues that it's rumored this architecture will face once dual core is fully supported by software. The lackluster 64bit performance (which will very likely come almost hand in hand with dual core support for home users). The heat and power issues, that even though you say aren't sufficient to be a concern, are certainly at issue for some when compaired with AMD's offerings. And the near certainty of a much much much better processor (and at an acceptable pricerange) from intel within a year. It's like telling someone to buy a $250 Athlon Xp in 2002.