Whoops, I was mistaken. i7 2600Ks were delivered in the 2nd half of December to reviewers. I remember Ryan being unhappy because he got it pretty late, between Christmas and New Years, and he had CES to plan for.

Ryan did have hand's on with Ontario in September though, but Intel could have easily had test setups like that available to reviewers if they could. Both Intel and AMD had demonstrations of these chips at Computex earlier that summer as well, iirc.