It definately depends on price. AM3 Motherboards are much cheaper than LGA 1156. you can get a Phenom II x3 720 and Mobo for under $200. an i5 and Mobo is a $300 deal. The i5 is better, but it's also 50% more expensive, and to be honest most games only use 2 cores right now, some use 3, but not many. The big advantage of a 3 core processor is that it lets you unload all the additional background windows crap onto the third core. Given my expenses I'd definately go for the x3 720. The x2 550 is also a nice chip, and it may clock slightly higher than the 720, but it's only $20 cheaper, and from most of the benchmarks that I've seen, it looks like the third core is much more beneficial than an extra 100-200mhz of clock speed, and...