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I'm thinking about building a new machine. It would be used for video processing, development, etc. Not gaming. 4 cores seems like a reasonable solution for this. The question is whether to go with the AMD Phenom II or the Intel Core 2 Quad. The Core i7 is pricier than I want to go right now due mainly to the motherboard costs. The AMD and Intel chips seem to be similarly priced and benchmark similarly. Is there a compelling reason to go with one over the other?

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I would take a look at all the linked articles here. That's quite a recent review of some of the higher end chips.

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You might also consider the hidden cost of power usage:

  • at load (if you plan to do folding or something else that loads the cores 100%)

  • at idle (if it's a typical desktop / server, it is idle the vast majority of the time)

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I'm what you might call an Intel fanboy nowadays.

The Intel chips perform a bit better and the prices are low enough now that there's not much difference compared to AMD.

The main reason however that I prefer Intel is that I've been bitten by bad chipsets in the past when using AMD cpus.

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  • Same here. I keep giving AMD a try because I want them to work out, and I keep having stability issues that seem to go back to mobo/chipset (not to mention overheating), so I keep ending up back with Intel. That said, my AMD powered Sun workstation is awesome! Apparently it's just not reasonable to build your own AMD system though.
    – Brian Knoblauch
    Aug 13, 2009 at 12:21
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    Overheating is a weak arguement... I build last week a Phenom II 940 system and he never go over 40 degrees on load and 30 on idle.. That said I didn't put 1 millions fans in it, just take and Antec three hundred case with stock fan and it's sufficient.
    – Marc-Andre R.
    Sep 3, 2009 at 14:41
  • AMD makes their own mainstream chipsets now and they're pretty solid. :-)
    – hanleyp
    Sep 9, 2009 at 2:26
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If you want to make from it hackintosh or use Intel compiler buy Intel otherwise buy Phenom II (because it's cheaper a bit).

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