intel is a decent buy for 1 good reason it has basically set a universal socket for all current some legacy and all new processors for their motherboards the 775 socket. though AMD have more horsepower under the hood they alternate back and forth between two socket styles the am2 and am2+. more variety from the intel CPU's as u get to choose from the families of pentium D, celeron, dual core, core 2 duo, quad core, xeon, corei7, core 2 duo extreme, and almost any new cpu they plan on throwing at us. all having there own pro's and con's.
but as stated AMD cpu's except when compared to quad cores don't have much of a fight vs intel cpus in terms of speed, multitasking and multithreading.
regardless of choice both manufacturers do quality work.