Phenom II 965 seems faster in some games than I7 920

[anubis44]

Hi all. I have recently been asked by a number of friends, family, etc. which CPU to with for gaming. Although my inclination was to recommend an i7 920, I came across this comparison of CPU scaling with the Radeon 5970 on Legion hardware:

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=869&p=0

The gist of the article is that there is little to no difference between the i7 and the Phenom II X4 965 at clock speeds enthusiasts would actually use. (Eg. certainly not underclocked, and probably somewhat overclocked or at least at stock speeds). In fact, in a few titles, the Phenom II was slightly faster when overclocked to the same 4.0GHz clock rate as the i7! The tests were conducted at 2560x1600, so it's true that even the Radeon 5970 was maxing out its frame rates, but still, how could the Phenom II loose many benchmarks to the mighty i7 and still deliver the goods in real world games? We've all seen that the AMD path can make sense for those with modest budgets, going with lower to mid-range graphics cards, but how can the Phenom II beat the i7 with an ultra-high end graphics subsystem like the 5970? The games where the Phenom II prevailed or was equal to the i7 were: Wolfenstein (Max quality - 2560x1600), Call of Duty: Modern War 2 (DX9 - 2560x1600), Crisis (DX10, High quality - 2560x1600), Far Cry 2 (DX10, High quality - 2560x1600), Battle Forge (DX10, Max quality - 2560x1600), HAWX (DX10, Max Quality - 2560x1600).

At this point, I'm not so sure I'm going to be sending my friends and family to the Intel side for gaming. The Phenom II X4 saves them about $100 vs. the i7 920 on the CPU alone, the boards are cheaper also, and AMD doesn't seem to screw around with different sockets quite as much as Intel does, meaning your AMD mobo might just last you through another CPU revision upgrade.

Just wanted to get some intelligent input into what some of you other Sharks think about these results.