Quote from Jakg :

I'm sure AMD CPU's are very good but tbh Intel has covered the range from £31 (E1200) all the way up to £250 (E8600)..

well, looking at some quick game benchmarks at tomshardware, i see that for games, similarly priced X2s are performing better than C2D. i looked at X2 5200+ vs e2160

besides, if a cpu can give more than 60-70fps, you can stop there and give more money to a better gpu. i mean that if you have 300 to spend, it is better to spend 200 on the gpu and 100 to the cpu instead of 150/150. TRUE that this split is targeted at gaming. for instance, when i got my specs, i gave 50 for the cpu (be2350) and 150 for the gpu (3850 256). it is a good split.

what do you think?

the cpu will bottleneck you. plus the amds that are getting a little better than intel are both stock. you overclock that intel and amd cant catch up at all. idk what anybody says intel is winning atm but amd is rushing out there new cpus to go against the new intel i7 cpus that are coming in the next few months. so its gonna be interesting to see what happens next.

overlooking posts, so badly written that would make any elementary school teacher weep, i'd like to point out, that in a usual PC and under usual circumstances, it is not 'always' the cpu/gpu that 'bottlenecks' the system. depends largely on the matter at hand. No matter what combination of CPU+GPU you have i can show you code that will STARVE one and leave the other idle. So in the end, saying that "the cpu will bottleneck the system" is really just empty words, especially when you do not specify the circumstances.

oh, jakg, the k8 is the athlon 64, not the dualcore. dualcores are codenamed K9. and in many benches that i see, they are perfectly adequate, since in modern games the gpu has a very heavy burden.

to fully understand where i am getting at, first look at a simple benchie from gamestop. i mean, gamespot. ()

Notice the numbers in the '1600x1200, High Quality' table.
we see here that any decent cpu (C2D, X2, phenoms, QX) will perform the same. why? because the "gpu bottlenecked" the system. Since i do not really like that phrase, though, i will say "gpu bound" instead. but that would be incomplete. The complete way would be "with crysis 1600x1200 high settings, if you have a 8800GTX, it doesn't matter what cpu you have. you'll get 25 fps tops" (similar benchies here which show that with a 8800gtx and high quality at very high resolutions it doesn't actually matter what cpu you have. )

tl;dr: gpu matters way more than amd vs intel.