I've probably built well over 500 computers, maybe close to a thousand. AMD vs Intel is moot, it just depends on the current market and where your budget fits on the price/perfomance scale. Right now, without question, Intel's Conroe based Core Duo chips are THE chips to get. These new chips blow anything from AMD out of the water. They have forced AMD to cut prices by about 50% on their entire line. The problem is there are very few motherboards on the market that support Conroe and the good ones are pretty pricey. In a month or two we should see some midrange boards on the market. My current system is a single core Athlon 64 based, a 1.8 3000+ Venice overclocked at 2.6ghz. A $200 overclocked Conroe chip will completely smoke this system, like a DX civic vs an STi lol. Anyway though, back on topic, for a budget system this is a great time to build a cheap Athlon 64 machine. You can also expect retail branded Athlon 64 sytems to drop significantly in price shortly if they already have not. At work I buy everything from Dell though, we get service and pricing from Dell no one can touch. I'd highly recommend a Dell system, just buy the gold technical support, even if you have to use it once its worth it. No hold times, and you'll get an english speaking american that probably lives in the same city you do. No offence to any overseas call center workers that may be on 8thcivic
