Performance per dollar based off overall system price, which CPU is you?

[averyblund]

Funny to see this posted. Just this morning I was debating with myself between the i3-530 and the Athlon II X4 635. Until about 2006 I built pretty much AMD machines only, but since then I have been all Intel. The i3 has without a doubt a stronger presence on single core programs, but the X4 handily beats it on heavily multi-threaded situations. Considering that I was building a renderbox/LAN machine I considered both fairly important. In the end I went with the X4 because it was $5 cheaper and with the constant move to further multithreading in games I expect it to make up some of the difference there.

That said AMD is going to need a real miracle to make them competitive enough for most people to ditch the Intel brand. At this point the benefits of the AM3 chips are so minimal they barely exist. I'm glad to support them, and have all the world of hate for Intel, but looking at the various benchmarks AMD is barely holding a price/performance edge at all. Though I went with a Radeon 5770 over whatever Nvidia crapped out in a heartbeat, so AMD isn't doing bad across the board.