I build systems, mostly for engineering or servers, so that stuff is all Intel
My home systems I have built have been AMD.
I can say that over the past 10 years I have built myself a new system every year until I built this one, I can't justify building one because this one works so well.
Right now it is over 2 years old. So this year I am going to get a new graphics card and that is it.
MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Phenom 9950 Agena 2.6GHz Socket AM2+ 125W Quad-Core Black
OCZ Reaper HPC 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model
Now this is some old chit from computer standards, I am running an old ATI 3870 Graphics card and an OCZ 700 watt power supply
The only thing I am getting this year is a ATI 6850 graphics card and I bet it will be good for another year or two.
For many years the hardware was always the bottle neck with running the software that was being written.
Now days not so much other than graphics.
three things people always went cheap on and systems suffer for. Power Supply, RAM and Graphics cards.
The most over looked is the power supply, go cheap here and you will suffer.
If you want to spend the extra money the i7 is the processor to go with and buy a good quality motherboard, not the cheapest that will take the processor. I also think building your own system is far better than buying a packaged deal.
I have spent over 50,000.00 in computer equipment (not all for myself) at Newegg, and I don't see a reason to shop someplace else unless they don't have what I am looking for. The few times I shopped Tiger I was not impressed.