Wow, neither of you own Intel or AMD… You just support their products… Who the fuck cares, someone just puts out something better the next day. This guy is looking for someone to help build his pc, not get his thread hi-jacked.
Intel is fast, and generated alot of heat. It also uses alot more power.
AMD is cheaper, just as fast, and doesn’t use alot of power.
You’ll be happy with either if you’re going quad core.
Mac is going to grow in popularity, but i’d probably dual boot either, Lynix, GNOME based GUI, or stripped version of xp pro.