Any kind of part that is binned by the manufacturer and that is a raw component, is fairly easily cherry-picked as a by-product of the testing flow. In fact, beyond mere cherry-picking, there is the possibility of using "skew lot" engineering sample chips in the production boards. A skew lot is a selection of components that are purposely designed and manufactured by the the fabrication facility that test the limits of the design with regards to manufacturability. So you can have a faster or slower skew lot, or one that is higher power, or lower power, or one in which half the transistors are faster or slower than the other half, etc. They are practically required by modern high-volume manufacturing and I'm sure that all vendors are provided with a wide variety of skew parts by their fabs. Beyond merely cherry-picking from parts, you could just package one batch of high-speed skew parts for use on reviewer boards.
This said, I would imagine that the practice is fairly uncommon. It is in the best long-term interests of the manufacturers not to be deceptive - or seen to be deceptive. I am sure that it is done, but I am also fairly confident that it's rare. It is also harder to do with packaged components that are not binned (ie. motherboards) than it is to do with raw components that are binned by the manufacturer (ie. CPU's). Memory is somewhere in the middle. Most memory manufacturers are merely packagers for memory that is produced elsewhere. In most cases, they order, for example, DDR400 chips and package them in DIMMS. They probably have the capability to bin parts, but they are unlikely to do so for mass manufactured parts. Cherry-picking would be a more difficult task, but it is still possible.
I wonder how much more this thread might have been had the original poster not used such an aggresive, abrasive writing style that caused most members of the forums to adopt a defensive attitude.
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