A agree with your idea - but 4GHz is still out of reach for many members here: many of us can't afford to upgrade often enough for that. Don't get me wrong, this is a free prize and OcUK have every right to give it away how you want - I have no right to free stuff and I'm quite happy to buy my upgrades if I'm not lucky enough to win them... but a semblance of inclusiveness and fairness in the contest would make it feel a lot less like OcUK is only interested in those spending money for the latest, greatest kit.
I'd suggest, that most people are members of two groups - either the "constant upgrade" crowd who will have 4Ghz capable kit, or those with 3-6 year old machines just starting to check out their next upgrade.
To me, a more interesting competition would've been a few smaller prizes for different categories: a 2GHz dual-core contest etc - although tbh, it's still going to be the newer Intel chips that win, as they've got better clock-for-clock performance than older Intel or AMD chips.
A nice basic idea, but flawed at the most fundamental level - and tbh, OcUK know enough about computers to be aware of how intrinsically flawed it is: even without an unobtainable-for-many 4GHz limit, per-clock performance is much higher with newer architectures than old.
As mentioned above, anyone who can realistically win this is going to have an i7, probably one of the newer ones (Haswell, or at least Ivybridge) and have upgraded recently.... making it a contest for the elite or those lucky enough to have done a big upgrade recently.
The only way this could be realistically fair would be to split it into dual and quad-core (I'll even let you ignore those of us, like me, with tri-core chips), for Core2Duo, the various generations of the 'Core i' chips, and each of the major AMD Architechtures (AM2, AM3, FM1, FM2). It would've needed a lot of prizes (I make it 8 AMD and 8 Intel, ish, for 4 generations of both quad and dual core), but at least most active members could participate on equal terms.
The fact that 4 of the top 5 times were done with the exact CPU which is to be given away as the prize, frankly, says it all. I somehow can't see a Q6600 breaking into the top 10.
