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The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf

business apps? intel
gaming? get AMD

depends on your primary use and if your going to spend the money get the i7 intell processor

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depends what you're after

AMD is beter for overclocking as the Intel chips turn themselves off when they get too hot.

overclocking was great back in the day now its a total waste
why wouldnt you want it to turn off its too hot

bottlenecks now with a good processor have more to do with drive speed. overclocking is totally useless on todays chips

the last machine i built
Intel® Core™ i7-860 Processor
Intel® Desktop Board DQ57TM
GeForce GTX 260
OCZ Agility Series OCZSSD2-1AGT120G 2.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

OCZ Gold 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Voltage Desktop Memory Model OCZ3G1600LV6GK

the guy i built it for obviously had money for it and the perifreals are pretty meaningless for performance we used an off the shelf cheapest at the time TB western digital for storage drive and housed only the OS on the solid state..

I seriously want this guy to dies a horid death for never letting me use it
o

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I don't know, there's nothing I like more than a rapidly expanding pool of molten silicon seeping out of the bottom of my case.

Simple pleasures

From personal experience, I would have to say AMD all the way, but I seem to have bad luck with Intel chips.

I have had three Intel chips die on me running stock speeds/no modification, and I have run countless AMD processors at stock and over-clocked speeds and have yet to have one die.

Also, as I am a budget builder, AMD is great since the performance to cost ratio is much friendlier in most cases.

Granted it has been a few years since I tried an Intel chip, but they are permanently banned from any personal builds that I perform due to my past experiences.

And yes, I am a qualified electrician and computer technician, so it wasn't handling or ESD that made them die :\

so very true my friend. as to your problems with the intel chips i have never encountered such out of the many i have dealt with but I have also received many initially bad power supplies in the past so like everything manufactured I am sure its possible. (most likely unlucky with power supply/surges tho

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The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf

Go with the AMD then way cheeper and will suite your usage

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I have built dozens of PCs during the last two decades. Only one with AMD, all the others with Intel. I have not had any problems with the processors, even with over-clocking. There are much more counterfeit or re-labeled Intel chips, so if you get them without certificates (even from Newegg), you could have bad luck.

AMD could be faster at fix point operations, Intel is better at floating points, but the difference is small. People's decision is usually not based technical merits, but subjective or political reasons, like "support AMD to keep competition alive", or "Intel is too big and big corporations are evil".

Over-clocking needs a suitable motherboard. I like ASUS, but there are many other good companies. My i7 2.66GHz tolerates over-clocking to 3GHz (12.5%), with a good fan or water cooling. You can play with the memory speed, too. There is a noticeable improvement in certain applications with faster memory. All together you could usually achieve 10-15% speedup, which you will not notice except during long computations, like video transcoding. It could finish in 10 hours, instead of 12. Is it worth the loss of stability (occasional crashes)? It depends on your applications.

For gaming the video card is the most important component. For minimizing boot up or application startup time, get a faster disk, like SSD (although they don't live long and cannot take too many write operations).

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The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf

Honestly If you go with nVidia or ATI chipset, they are both good.

For general purpose, I would say that 512MB video ram is more than enough, so clock speeds are where you will see the performance boost.

An ATI Radeon HD 4770 or a nVidia GeForce 9800GT should push most moderately new games on the market at decent visual quality, and they are both around $100 US.

I would recommend XFX, EVGA, BFG, or Gigabyte for card manufacturers, as I have owned all of them and they are all high quality products.

Also, don't skimp when it comes to RAM. Coupled with a Phenom x4 I would say, provided you are going with a 64bit OS, go get 4GB (or more, but I only run 4).
As far as brands on RAM go, Corsair, OCZ, and Mushkin are my favorites. Just please be sure that you match the RAM to the specifications of the motherboard.

Does it really matter?
Next year it will be old, obsolete and to slow
Buy what you need but don't spend money for things you don't use.
Somebody did buy a system with 2 quad core cpu as the manufacturer of a specific program advised, turns out that the program only uses one core...
So get also a good program

I myself would go with Nvidia graphics card (512 mb is fine) and Intel chip (atleast dual core, 2.0GHZ). in modern days, i would also think 2+GB RAM would be decent.
I dunno how much you game or work with graphics, so it depends on that mostly.
(hint, i just listed off my 3 year old computer specs. but it's still pretty good in todays life!)

if you're an online gamer, you also need to realize Internet speed is a MAJOR part in speed. If you use dialup, an epic pc won't help to much I would guess atleast 6mb/s would be good. I have 1/2 that and get decent ping on most games. but some games just make me cry a little.

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rawr. be very afraid
*poke*
Note: My name is all lowercase for a reason.
"I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault, Bigfoot is blurry. So there's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside."