If you get down to the facts, AMD and Intel are almost dead even, if you put them up against each other in the exact same systems with the exact same compnents, they would perform almost equal, I went with AMD just becaue it was cheaper, and I only have a AMD Athlon XP 1800+, and with my ATI 9600 Pro, I have had exceptional performance, I have not found anything that I cannot throw at my computer. My sister has a Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz processor, and her computer is almost the same as mine, with same videocard, and our computers are about dead even for almost all games and applications, so as for the processor, as long as you get AMD or Intel...Athlon XP or Pentium 4, you cannot go wrong.