It really depends on individual needs , for an average everyday user either company is fine synthetic benchmarks mean nothing to people who don't even take advantage of such numbers in the real world, for gamers it also depends because realistically speaking the gpu is the main thing for a gamer even moreso than a cpu, for a power user or someoone that is used to very cpu intensive tasks then it depends on budget......but i have found that things in the computer world are very cyclical,there was a time wehn amd dominated the performance race, back when the pentium lll was getting vicously spanked by most amd chips then the p4 came out but amd was still the better overall chip,then the core 2 chips came out and intel dominated again for a long time until amd caught up with the phenom ll's,now we have the nehalem processors coming out and intel is on top again while amd is the price to performance king.....they switch back and forth all the time so you can't really pick one lol