Personally I go AMD... They are significantly cheaper, they run as well as and in some cases better than anything Intel puts out... Now on to the questions... I've never seen any flat out fact showing one is better at something than another one except by saying it's Mhz are higher... The 2Ghz+ cpu is just Intel trying to one up AMD, because their chip has the capability to operate at a higher frequency (MHZ) than the AMD chip.... but what makes the XP/MPs so good is their architecture allows them to handle data faster by processing larger chunks at a time.... for example Intel would do 200 Mhz and 32bit chunks and AMD would do 180Mhz and 48bit chunks... so it basically evens out. For gaming performance... go with 900+ MHZ and the best video and RAM you can afford and you'll be able to handle everything that will be coming out for a while... I'll let others voice their opinions by ending this here.... We're like Radioshack..you've got questions we've got answers 