I looked at the Phenoms before I bought what I did. Reviews are not good, not good at all. AMD seems to have rushed this series out there faster than they should have, duo-core intel chips were blowing it away in benchmarks. Meanwhile the Q series from intel was at the top of every benchmark list I read, and in stock form. If you're buying a cpu now, AMD may be the cheap way to go as far as quad-core, but it's not the smartest way to go. I used to have AMD, but I go with the best.