I've actually been looking into this for the past couple days since i'm going to be building a gaming machine also. From what I gathered the majority of the people here will say that AMD AThlons are better for gaming than the Pentium 4's. The pentiums might preform slightly better for other applications but AMD beats Intel in the gaming world. Anyone correct me if i'm wrong but that I what I have been able to gather so far. I'm actually thinking about buying either a AMD Athlon 64 3800+ or 4000+, not decided yet.