LOL, I don't! I wouldn't hesitate to buy AMD if it made sense. I'm not an overclocker, because I'm not good at it. I don't have the patience to make minor adjustments. I make broad adjustments and blow my motherboard or processor.
That's why it makes sense for me to go with either company. I do care a little about power consumption, but both companies offer good products that aren't over the top. AMD simply isn't for overclockers right now, they have NO overhead on their products.
I'm no OC'r either, i prefer not to test the limits of techno-engineering, however when i designed and built the system i thought i did my research and settled on the 4200+, the system ran well with decent 3DMark06 scores but the BM tool indicated a serious handicap on the CPU intensive programs.
Jumping from the 4200+ to the 5200+ gave it a noticable increase in performance with a score of 8487 but the CPU was still struggling on (correct me if I'm wrong) "red planet", I had been pondering the 6000+ with the larger L2 cache when i stumbled upon the 6400+ Black Edition, the combo including the 2GB Corsair XMS sticks made it even more attractive.
This new CPU and RAM should put me at or above 10,000 which means absolutely nothing but makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, besides i wanted a excuse to water-cool the CPU and get rid of that noisy CPU cooling fan
A lot of my entertainment programs are graphics and CPU intensive flight sims that really lay a heavy burden on the hardware.
My first graphics card was the 7950GTX which rocked until the PSU flew South with the mobo and video card in tow
, Newegg refunded the 7950GTX as it was no longer available and replaced the ASUS M2N32-590SLI mobo, while this was taking place i sent the PSU back to houston and slipped a FSP group 750W unit in it's place, then i purchased a EVGA 8800GTS 320MB video card and slid it into the vacant PCI-E slot, I'm contemplating adding another 8800GTS and running them in SLI if i get the notion or can prove to myself that it will improve my gaming performance.
I'm confident that running 2 GTS 320's in SLI is better than 1 GTX 640MB.
I'll have to ante-up and post some pics of the bad-boy soon.
Cya L8r, George