Or it was the best of the day for the dollar.
As to comparing a machine that is exactly the same parts save HT, my bet is it's less than a percent point in benchmarks that are system wide.
I just wondered why HP picked NVIDIA nForce 430 chipset, which only provides HT 2.0, for its "Pavilion Media Center m8330f," and both MSI and Biostar chose the same chipset for it AM3 motherboard(GF615M-P33 and MCP6P3).
Even more surprises me, they all received pretty good reviews.

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