For my primary system, I went with AMD's quad on a 790FX chipset. Before the boos start rolling in, realize that there is an Intel element to this story to temper my first sentence.
I had been using an E6600 on a DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G motherboard. That was the sweetest f'ing chipset I'd ever used and the processor was quite nice since it was a first-run C2D that did 3.6GHz. Golden chippo from that batch.Anyway, about a year later I bought an E8400 to replace it. The rumor was that the 45nm chips were clocking high, but nobody knew if the DFI would work with it. It didn't. It also died after being flashed to the BIOS revision that was supposed to add 45nm support. Since I had to buy a whole new mobo anyway, I re-investigated my options with gaming in mind. I'd always been an ATI fan, so I was looking for something with a lot of slots and excellent Crossfire support. There were 790FX boards with four PCIe 2.0 slots that were also very well-featured and more affordable than similarly-featured, three-slot (max) Intel options. I know there are some Intel boards with four slots on them now, but at the time this story takes place they were rare to non-existent. I went in knowing the CPU wouldn't be as fast but that the extra slot would more than make up for any CPU deficiency. So, that's why I liked the AMD platform better.
HOWEVER--I've also built a quite nice system around that E8400 that I was unable to use in the first place. It's currently making my server very happy, and it seems like a very nice system as well.
I like 'em both.
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