AMD has lost their edge. They used to compete with low priced processors that were pretty much matched, within a few percent, with Intel's offerings. With their newest flagship Bulldozer processors retailing at 279.00 you can save yourself $60.00 and go with the a Intel i5-2500k and have nearly the same performance. The AMDs may do well in highly multithreaded scenarios, but their single core performance isn't stellar.