Back around 2k I owned a computer business and I was a reseller of both Intel and AMD. AMD was far and away the most "friendly" towards the little guy. I sold well over 70% AMD. Only very high end builds or special requests were Intel. I will never buy Intel for my gaming rigs, and I will avoid them whenever possible for laptops. Intel is out for the dollar and nothing else. AMD has the compassion of a small town company but with "near" comprable products to Intel.

Am I a fan-boy? No, I use Xeon's almost exclusively in server builds. Different market, different needs. Home/enthusiast use is a very different area.

AMD called me at one point and offered to ship me sample boards and processor(s). Listen, they called me and offered. We mostly sell Intel.
I never did receive anything. SO why call and try to get me to switch. We sell mostly still Intel but that did piss me off. Just my .02 $

I love AMD... I think they are hard working and I believe one day they will reach the top.

lets hope that when they reach the top... they won't be like their... uh... competition...

To be honest, AMD has a much greater level of innovation in the CPU market. If you look at the Nehalem architecture, almost all of its best aspects- monolithic quad-core design, integrated memory controller, point-to-point serial system bus- were originally introduced in K10. Does the Intel version work better? Yes. Was it original? No.

That's what I love about AMD- they have creative ideas. Intel may be able to spit out better designs on existing ideas, but AMD far-and-away takes the prize for innovation.

It seems to ne, if youre to receibe free sample boards and free cpus, youd have followed that up with correspondence, Did you? And , if you did, what was the response from AMD? And , if that response wasnt to your liking, did you persue it further by naming the person you corresponded with to a superior?
Complaining with little knowledge of what really happened sounds.....

@JMS3096

It's the result that matters.

@AMD -> Advanced Micro Device company, not their fans

Don't forget that a while back plenty of ATI senior engineers fled the New AMD because AMD tells its ATI roadmap to nVidia for no obvious reasons & no obvious benefit.

It's a misconduct since YOUR heads got big when Intel Prescott failed to compete with YOUR Athlon X2 and too late to realize that their highest end Phenom can not compete with highest end Core2duo and let alone today's i7.

Without those senior engineers, there's no way YOU can defeat Intel and there's no way your ATI can defeat nVidia immediately because of lack of good drivers.

Now open source drivers??? That is just so lame--you can't make good driver so you let your users figure it out on their own.

Wake up AMD!!!

EVEN APPLE DOES NOT WANT YOUR X86!!!

I was in the market for building an all AMD system a few years ago in china, strictly for gaming. Asus or MSI board with Athlon X2 CPU & ATI chipset.

The problem was: there is no ATI chipsets in China even till this day. Look at your Opteron. The best 4 socket Opteron board has not 1 but TWO Intel gigabit ethernet???

I don't want to mix stuff especially from competing companies. If you can't get an all AMD, might as well make it all Intel with nVidia graphics.

Since we all know that nvidia chipset works best with nvidia graphics, isn't it obvious that getting a board for intel i7 with nvidia chipset & nvidia graphics is a way better system then a Phenom x4 with nvidia chipset (no ATI chipset down here) and ATI graphics?

So understand that it is indeed very difficult to get an all AMD not because of Intel, rather, because AMD IS NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH to compete with Intel!!!

AMD does NOT want to compete with intel anymore. Since Core2duo, YOU, AMD, have had this looser mentality and had only hoped to make money from mid-range products and by suing Intel!!!

WTF

Wake up AMD!!!

PROVE ME WRONG!!!

Let me buy a 4 socket OPTERON board with ATI Chipset and broadcom gigabit LAN!!! No intel no nvidia!!!

NAME one vendor that makes that!!!

JUST ONE!!!

Your vendors have factories in China and China population is billions. They game like crazy every single day and YOU, AMD, choose not do any ATI business in China and now YOU, AMD, are blaming Intel for your own lack of winning mentality!!!

If YOU, AMD, don't even believe you can win, why should WE, your (former) devoted fans, believe in YOU anymore?

PROVE ME WRONG!!!

Abandon all this Intel Lawsuits and focus on making great products like you used to. Defeat Intel!!!

Make Paul Otellini say it again to Intel shareholders: "We can not compete with AMD"

I wanna see the arrogant Steve Jobs of Apple knocking on your door begging on his knees to transition their X86 to AMD.

Make it happen!!!

For all who had loved AMD and for those who still does,

Best Regards,

-ND

This availability , could it have been the reason for the EUs decision?
They (Intel) have been found guilty 3 times, in three areas of the world, sounds like Intel had availibility all right

"He went on to explain how Intel's legitimate rebate programs work, and why the processor vendor accounted for more than 90% of his CPU sales in 2008"

I've noticed on the puget systems website, in order to get an AMD cpu, you need to select the "more..." option of cpus. I wonder if this accounts for anything.......

Hey fanboy, take a chill pill. Nobody cares if Apple doesn't use AMD CPU's. I'm sure least of all AMD.

I agree with JMS3096 though, most of the "new" features on the i7 were old news at AMD.

I love how everyone says "AMD is more creative than Intel, so we'll back them"...what good is creativity when they don't have the knowledge or know how to compete with Intel on a business level? Bitch and complain all you want about the "questionable" business tactics that Intel used in EU, but the bottom line is they sold the most systems, got the job done, and THEY MAKE THE BETTER PRODUCT. I don't care if AMD originally came up with great CPU designs and now Intel is using them....if you come up with a great idea, yet you don't have the motivation to properly get it heard and someone else runs with it, it's on you for your failures, plain and simple. I work in a shop in a small town that builds systems day in and day out, and we've never touched an AMD system. Why? Not because we're fanboys...it's simple....Intel produces results and stable systems, and AMD is garbage....all the way from Athlon XP to Phenom. Make a better product line and I'll switch in a heartbeat. Same goes with graphics...ATI can now compete with NVIDIA according to benchmarks, but every user review I've read says their drivers are still garbage.

Intel have the better product _right now_.

They haven't always had that, cue the Pentium 4 era to make an obvious example.

Indeed, AMD competes exceptionally well at each level of the CPU market aside from the i7. How many of us are using an i7 today?

Granted, with the i5 things are looking up even more for Intel but that's not "today".

I don't have a particular preference when it comes to CPUs. I went from an Athlon 64 3000+ to an Athlon X2 3800+ to a Core 2 Duo E6600 and the next stop is likely the i5.

That said, I do hope AMD puts out a great high-end product with upcoming architechtures so we can get away from being raped and plundered by Intel. The only reason there's $300/$500/$1000 CPUs on the market at all is because Intel know they have the market to themselves. If it weren't for AMD we might very well be paying those prices for double-chip, almost-4GHz Pentium D's even today.

Finally, it's nice to see a rebuttal of the original article even if it was quite obvious from that one, and looking through their website at that point in time, that there are rather rabid Intel fanboys even at retail.

That just isn't healthy for the consumers.

It's a little hard when you're against a company that can spend more on R&D than you make in a year. Most people don't know crap about computers. All those model numbers confuse them, and so when you're a company that has been around for 20 years as pretty much the only CPU seller, that helps. The billions in advertising helps too, the average Joe doesn't know which chip is better, all he knows is to make sure an Intel is inside.

How is it that AMD only received 25-30% of the market with an obviously better chip? The difference was even greater than i7 vs. PhenII, at least PhenII does well in gaming comparisons, even winning a few benchmarks. AMD would've had to beat Intel for nearly a decade without interruption for them to get a 50% market share in my opinion. Hey, longtime old brands are valuable, that's why when SBC took over AT&T, they decided to change their name to AT&T. I bet there are some of you who haven't heard of SBC, but everyone knows AT&T. Same with Intel.

AMD had a good run. It was shameful for Intel, a huge dominant monopoly, to let an upstart get the better of them for even one month much less than the 5 years or so AMD was on top. Still when you have nearly endless resources, you can afford to make huge mistakes and still come back, sort of like the Soviet Union in WWII.

I'm pulling for AMD, but it's a big underdog and has been from the start. Just think about how terrible Intel's graphics chips are, yet they're by far the market leader. Yeah, it's from integrated chipsets, but see how much of an advantage they have? They can make money without even putting up a product, but ATI and Nvida have to consistently put out the best GPUs to have a chance.

all I can say is Prescott ... Just glad the C2D were better or lese I would still be an AMD person

was AMD from k6 - XP Days ... lost Faith in their Opterons ect ... the C2D from intel made me swing back to Intel ,,, i am just hoping AMD will have a killer CPU / GPU ,., someday

for now my nxt PC might just be an i7 ...

What I really want is a true Green PC that will run on Minimum power when you choose ,,, and Blast off like i rocket when you unlock power feature ( 99% of my time on pc now is MSN / Watching Media .. very little game play but I do still get the Craving to play a game and like keeping PC capable of playing future games ... what I do not like is my pc Idling @ 600 watt's ( currenty getting an Nvidia ION system intergrated into my gaming case to leave on 24 / 7 )

@Luiken:
I agree that Intel offers better stuff on the higher end. I have two of their CPU's right now. However, AMD makes really good stuff in the low-mid end, and they're just as reliable and stable as Intel's. AMD is hardly garbage, but you wouldn't know since you never touch their systems. I remember when Intel was getting their asses kicked by AMD for a long time, did the Athlon64 slip your mind? I still have one of those too. Just like ATI cards, you've read reviews on the All-Knowing Internet where people say their drivers are garbage. You didn't read many cause there's plenty of people (like me) who never have any trouble with their drivers. You didn't read very many nVidia reviews either because I've read plenty that said theirs were garbage (remember when Vista came out?). And you obviously didn't try an ATI card yourself, so why all the hostility towards these companies you have no experience with? Tell the guys you work with they should do a little research and not limit their options so badly. And next time they tell you "AMD is garbage" is the reason you guys don't sell them, maybe you could, I don't know, ask them for a better reason. Just a thought.

I like Amd and I like Intel... That's because I love competition and innovation. I'd love to see both companies making a lot of money and investing it into better cpu' and such.

I would even love to see a third chipmaker which could compete and change the whole market.

At the moment Amd is the one who needs help so I support it more.

Well I did try Intel/AMD/ATI/NVidia, and I've read all the comments, and guess what? AMD and ATI are garbage, their product is garbage, their research teams are garbage. For me, it's i7 and Xeon/Itaniums with Asus boards. (stop slobering about AMD coming up with the architecture first, because they did not. i7 is different, and Itanium is even more original and better architecture then anything amd ever created, Intel never lacked in creativity, they have much more of it than amd, and Intel's products are always solid, hence the price... I guess if you're too poor, then you go with amd and are bound to defend them to the end...

I've been building my own computers since the 386 days. I've always tried new things and never stuck to what popular opinion says and is repeated by the masses. I've used both Intel and AMD processors over the years whenever one had the advantage over the other. I've tried all manner of off the wall combinations that the average user or the normal computer reseller wouldn't offer. For years I was into 3d creation programs before 3d was even a buzz word, and just recently took down a eight system render farm when we moved to a new house.

Intel has had long periods of time when they made the best CPU's. My first dual systems were dual pentium/Tyan combos, I had dual pentium pro systems (one of my favorite processors) with more memory on the CPU's than most people had in main memory at the time. Dual Pentiun II systems. Xeons also, but never tried anything Itanium. I have a Pentium 4 system (one of my least favorite) in the house atm and a core2 system. Reliability wise, that I can remember, I've had around 5 or 6 intel CPU's fail on me over the years and a couple intel of motherboards(strangly never a "consumer" board, they were both very exspensive server boards). No over clocking and always very good cooling solutions, they just failed due to defects.

AMD's 586-133 back in the day easily handed higher speed and far more expensive Intel processors their hats. Athlon64's did the same thing for YEARS. I've built just as many AMD systems as I have Intel and had changed all my render farm computers from xeons to opterons. They are slower, on a single system a render may take a few more minutes, but on the other hand they use so much less power to achieve 85% of the performance that I could throw in a couple more systems and still stay within the same power envelope and actually do distributed work faster overall. I've never had an AMD processor fail and only one motherboard fail but that was a Nforce 4 SLi board and not an AMD chipset. I currently have in the living room a AMD phenom system with a fanless CPU cooler, two Gigabyte 8600GTS fanless GPU's in SLi and a XFi PCI-e soundcard(waffle-iron)hooked to our big screen. It will play Crysis and Farcry 2 with some pretty good frame rates, runs HOT with only one big, almost silent fan on the power supply as the only cooling in the case. Couple of years now never being turned off and still going strong. My gaming rig is a Phenom II/Dual GPU sytem. I also have a opteron system and an Atholon X2 system with Dual GPU's.

So really anyone saying that they are professional builders and never used any AMD products were pretty much shafting their customers. Saying they are junk is a total misrepresentation. Actually my experience is that AMD stuff is more reliable and costs less overall in build and operation.

Ever noticed that most Intel fanboys use foul language?
@Luiken $ others:

Both intel and amd have something to offer in both server & home usage hardware. Intel indeed has the performance crown in both areas, but amd doesn't lag so far behind as one might think thanks to its aggressive pricing and forward / backwards compatibility in both server / home usage worlds, causing the company to lead the mainstream market and be the wisest choice for gamers on a budget.

Both intel and amd have lots to offer, and if I would have enough money I would definitely get an intel. But since I'm one of those who's on a budget and still would like to play without any compromise, I owe a big thanks to amd for their fair pricing and good products.
Small reminder (there are many others): On January 2007 a Q6600 sold for more than 800$.

What a load of BS. According to Newegg they sell more Phenom 2 processors than they do i7 processors, so how can NO ONE want AMD. Get real.

You have to love how ever since Intel had any level of superiority, their fanboy and fan-retailers make it out like AMDs CPUs are "slow". Yeah, my Phenom II X4 940 is absolute overkill for all of my needs, but these folks try to convince me that I need an i7 that won't serve my needs any better. Maybe my Phenom II is super responsive, loads any of the multi-boot OSes in the blink of an eye, and cuts through compute-intensive rendering tasks like a hot knife through butter, but it loses synthetic and video encoding bencharks(neither of which I care about) to the i7, so it still sucks... Right...

If you have never owned/built an AMD, then why are you slamming it so badly? Make a better product and you will switch - how on earth was the Athlon XP not leaps and bounds better than the P4 (yet you call out the innovation that changed the CPU game altogether)? In those days, the Intel chips were inefficient, not easily overclocked, and ran hot hot hot. Not to mention the fact that the PIII was admittedly better for Intel back then compared to the dead-end P4 architecture (still had speed limitations).

I can help you out though so you can rethink the one sided argument, I have many experiences with both AMD and Intel, and also ATI and Nvidia. Intel always costs more no matter what you get, bang for the buck goes to AMD every generation of chips without question. Both make quality chips, never seen "garbage" quality from either side. It is a systematic cycle with one camp being faster than the other. AMD was champ for years, Intel was champ the past few, and AMD is back on the upswing with the newer AM3 Phenom II. I flip-flop on graphics, whoever is up and for the price that works the best, then that's the one to go with. The 8800 series Nvidia GPUs were hard to beat, when they got lazy, went through so many renaming schemes, and had a big problem with the GPU failures on certain chips, I went back to the ATI HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series. Again, for the money, you couldn't do better at the time with ATI's upswing in the GPU market. Drivers have never been a huge problem for me from either camp. However, they are more than anything the most inconsistent aspect from either side. As far as garbage goes, weather it be 32/64 bit Windows or 32/64 bit Linux, drivers from both camp have always just simply worked at the very least.

Next time, form an opinion off of experience/knowledge instead of just trashing certain products because of what you "heard" or just feel about it!

I have to agree with Matt_B. I manage this areas most successful repair shop. We have an avg of 30 machines on our bench at any given time. We see more failures on the AMD side by far. I used to be an AMD guy personally. I switched to Intel about 8 years ago and after seeing the failures from AMD on the bench day in and day out, you just can't argue the fact that Intel makes a better quality product. The average guy who reads his articles and builds a few gaming PC's for him and his buddies a year does not have the background in either AMD or Intel when it comes to reliability. Intel beats AMD in that respect hands down. And honestly when AMD is only winning by a small amount of FPS in the gaming category, are you really gunna care more about that or the reliability of the system? Come on now.

I have owned both AMD & Intel CPU's they both have their good & bad points. I also work in a small shop have done so for 15 years. We build mostly Intel now but thats onbly because intel threatened to cut off our channel partner program is we didn't sell more Intel system's. My boss seems to hold that close to his heart so he instructed us to push the Intel system's harder & kinda leave the AMD system as an option only kinda like those guy's do from the puget site geez I wonder if Intel did the same thing to them too. As I said I have owned both companies CPU's & both work just as well. I have seen AMD CPU's fail but I have seen Intel CPU's fail as well 99% of the time these failures are caused by extreme heat or a blown mainboard. In either case most of the time when a system gets to us if you look inside & see the dirt packed into the CPU heatsink I always am amazed at how these things can keep working for as long as they do. I probably have built over 5000 system's & yes from both camps & find either companies CPU's to work just as good as the others. I have found that mainboards are the first to fail either from them being made cheaply or from power surges or just PEBKAC. Also we used to use Intel boards as our main back bone for our system's but they seem to have a high failure rate 1 out of 5 boards would fail in the first 3 or 4 months thank god for warranty we have since swithched mainly to ASUS boards sure they are kinda finicky but they work well. I also am getting my boss into Gigabyte boards. My point again both Intel & AMD have good products Intel is just better at marketing & also better at using scare tactics to scare small companies into using just their products maybe thats why Intel & Apple get along so well ok that was a joke..well sorta.

Sorry for the rant I'm just a little tired of some of the people that spout off garbage about a product or products they have never tried or given a chance.

amd vs intel stress tests, um, . . . if my memory serves, amd systems have less memory issues, even articles on this very site have stated, man, intel lovers really take losing hard, its like they are bad winners and even worse losers, and yeah i7's are nice but run super hot. im betting the phenom 2's will last longer if over clocked too.

over all i dispise intels development strategy, literally a new socket every other quarter, rediculous. . . . .

intel wants uneducated buyers, amd wants both.

and the only reason the i7 is so good is because finally intel figured how to copy some of amds technology into thier own. pfff. when will intel invent something worthwhile other than hyper threading which, . . well lets not even go thier.

i would just like to see intel get off its high horse and invent something new. i mean they are trying with larabbee but thier integrated stuff has been horrid for, . . well since it started.

although ive had more amd cpu's than intel cpu's i will be buying my friends used i7 cause he wants the new stepping to overclock it higher or some shinanigans. ill be buying on the cheap.

ive bought two amd processors this year, hopefully i can snipe a third. and ill have that used i7 920.

oh yeah i hate apple.

Well this is not a who's better CPU article, it’s a who's better marketing / distribution channel to reseller business article. Which was the point of the 1st article, and this rebuttal article.
Curious point on this rebuttal the last comments to the article explain why Jon at Puget was correct in his statement.

"Chris: I think that’s the message you’d want to get across. If they exist, how do builders get access to it?"

Here Chris final sentence in the article directing the main question of Jon from Puget’s question to them - as you read this, it is a direct question asked to him and the reply is;

"John: Right, that sounds like a good challenge on our part. Because we do have a number of programs, the same as the other guys. Maybe we don’t publicize it because they’re not offered across the board."

John agrees right we don’t do that question you asked Chris. even states we have programs just not publicized, meaning guys like Jon with Puget are speaking truth as Chris question is still unanswered correctly, they don’t have those programs available as easily for resellers programs to smaller businesses aka Puget boutique style shops.

Marketing talk doesn’t get it done when resellers need to actually sell stuff to stay in business. “But ours is not public” as he states, so the answer to the question of how do we get that info, of his final question asked?? Still goes legitimately unanswered. Well we know its not public but how do we get it?? still unanswered?? Puget is obviously a reseller, so why even if not public cant he get it, what’s this portion of not across the board mean as well, so whom non public is left out of that equation?????

Marketing / support dollars in the mfg to reseller channel are not unlimited, and as companies go we all know Intel is bigger then AMD and even APPLE, so they can spend more personnel dollars support resources to more smaller vendors on a global market to which all those companies do business.

I do work for a system builder and we do prefer Intel to AMD. In my opinion, if AMD would redesign their processor architecture like Intel did, they make come out on top again. Working with 8 year old technology vs. 3 year old technology just doesn't make sense to me.

I don't really se the price/performance margin being in AMD's favor currently either. A similarly performing processor from Intel costs about $40 more than a comparable AMD processor....and typically runs at a slower clock speed.

AMD has some good processors on the market, and are (again, my opinion) really killing it in the gaming graphics department, but I personally believe that they have a lot of catching up to do in order to give Intel a run for it's money. I'd personally like some information on how to get my company involved in their partner program. Intel's Retail Edge program is awesome. I'm sure AMD's similar program would be just as good.

I do work for a system builder and we do prefer Intel to AMD. In my opinion, if AMD would redesign their processor architecture like Intel did, they make come out on top again. Working with 8 year old technology vs. 3 year old technology just doesn't make sense to me.

I don't really se the price/performance margin being in AMD's favor currently either. A similarly performing processor from Intel costs about $40 more than a comparable AMD processor....and typically runs at a slower clock speed.

AMD has some good processors on the market, and are (again, my opinion) really killing it in the gaming graphics department, but I personally believe that they have a lot of catching up to do in order to give Intel a run for it's money. I'd personally like some information on how to get my company involved in their partner program. Intel's Retail Edge program is awesome. I'm sure AMD's similar program would be just as good.

Nice seeing some passionate and educated responses here. I've been a system builder on a small scale - mostly friends and family - for a long time now.

AMD really does have the platform nailed, especially for my budget builds. I look at my buying history at the dozens of motherboards I've bought, even in just the last six months. The Intel motherboards in the $60 price range typically have had only two slots for RAM, whereas the AMD boards in the same price range have four slots. If the board has integrated graphics, the Intel graphics suck, while AMD's seem to at least get basic jobs done more pleasantly so ... And several of the AMD boards have the 780G chipset, which supports hybrid crossfire. Throw in a cheap $30 ATI GPU and you've got 8 channel audio and the combined power of integrated and dedicated, which Tom's showed in a past article to actually post a marginal performance boost.

Assuming CPUs are equal performance per dollar across the board (which is seldom the case, depending on price fluctuations) you still get a little more performance for your dollar on the AMD build if you're in the budget segment, which many of my clients typically are.

The two "high end" builds have been based on Intel's quad core CPUs, but I'm about to make one for my mom with a Phenom II. Newegg has been having some crazy combo deals with the Deneb quad cores, and they are such an excellent value for the money. It will be a perfect editing rig for my mom and her photoshop and video editing - for a phenomenal price. (pun intended, har har...) The socket AM3 motherboard I got her was fifty bucks, and supports - you guessed it - four sticks of DDR2. FIFTY BUCKS!!! It also has integrated 8100 graphics if she ever wanted to do hybrid SLI for performance/power savings. What Intel board is $50 ($40 after mail in rebate) that has that kind of expandability and runs Intel's best CPUs? Your i7 boards are going to run you nigh $180-200 for the budget ones. They're great boards, and yes, the i7 is faster, but pair a 3.0GHz phenom II, 8GB of RAM, and a decent dedicated card and you've got a fairly powerful editing rig, for half the price.

And AMD might not hype their programs, trainings, and incentives like Intel does, but they are there. I just got a $35 triple core CPU and a T-shirt from AMD via their training program. And they shipped the incentive package a LOT faster than anything I've ever received from Intel.

Don't get me wrong, I love the i7 for my own rig. I wanted the best, and I've spend the dinars on it, but how many truly fall into that bracket? How many truly "need" to spend that much? Most don't, and I think with phenom II's doing so well, the upper mainstream or "budget" enthusiast is in a veritable sweet spot with plenty of fantastic options for graphics and CPU. AMD's most definitely a contender in this bracket, and I see a lot more consumers falling into that arena than the ultra-high end enthusiast.

If vendors aren't capitalizing on the platforms AMD offers, then they are crazy. It's their own fault. AMD setups offer better margins for manufacturers and resellers on the budget end, and provide customers with much better integrated graphics, and usually an extra core or two for the same price as a lesser Intel getup. When I go into Best Buy I see $600 AMD quad core rigs and $800 Intel dual core rigs. Even though sometimes the dual core would be faster - and we enthusiasts know that - the customer sees "quad core" and buys the AMD, especially because it's cheaper. Even if the CPU is inferior (like a 1.8 quad core ... yuk!) the integrated graphics are much better, and who knows. Maybe the customer will do some real multitasking or multithreaded editing some day when they learn how.

Their chances of AMD making a better CPU for that same socket (and probably with a lower envelope) are quite high, so they'll probably have a really cheap upgrade path.

@surrept420:
I've had an athlon xp 1900+ (1600mhz) for about 7 years until 6 months ago, and its been through hell. It's the palomino stepping which is very hot but my technician probably didn't care much so for the first 3 summers (~40*Celsius) it ran with one cranky intake fan and on a dusty room.
When I was abit older and got into computers, I checked the bios and discovered the cpu was on 80*c(!!) on ~50% load and immediately replaced the heatsink and fan, and added an exhaust. Except for a bad hard disk the computer is still working perfectly fine, and has served me well beyond the call of duty , always felt real snappy (even with xp sp3), and was even faster than pentiums @ 2.0ghz. Heck, I'm using a pentium 4 3.0ghz w/1gb ram at work and I would rather use my old comp any day.

Needless to say, those who bring computers to repair usually don't know anything about them, have crappy technicians (not very hard to find) and probably run them until they're fried. amd guys usually overclock (overcook?) as well.

I'm not a system builder, but I recently bought an AMD Phenom II from the IBuyPower website. I read the Puget Systems column while I was waiting for my PC to ship, and what Jon Bach said about AMD chips slipping out the socket easily during shipping had me a little worried. However, when my PC arrived, it was held firmly in place by a foam insert; simple, effective, and it completely nullifies his position on shipping problems being more of a concern for AMD.

Also, since IBuyPower does a great job of advertising BOTH Intel and AMD, I would give a lot more attention to their numbers than to a company who only advertises one of the two.