Can't tell without detailed knowledge of what other hardware you intend to use but I've had good performance out of AMD processors in the past. Best thing about them is the price. AMD's tend to run a little cheaper so you can afford more power. Intel however are more suited to certain MBs so you have to take the good with the bad and come to some compromise.

It all boils down to personal preference I guess, probably both pretty much the same, but I am using a Pentium IV........

I'm not much to put an input on this, but i would say AMD, it seems that they reach out for performance on a scale such as fs9.  Intel is geared to the professional aspect of things, and is great while not using games or other applications of this size.  But as everyone says, it does boil down to what the specifications of the computer is.  There could be a horrible AMD and a brand spanking new Intel and clearly it will be much better.  All in all, i say AMD.

-HF

I may be incorrect..
But my understanding is AMD has some speed advantages as far as gaming goes

But Intel has advantages with its Hyper-threading as far as burning Cd's & DVDs

But like I said I might be wrong. I think it has to do something with the way they do the computations...

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I second that motion.. All in favor?

Umm, currently, Intel has the edge on only one type of computing: Mathmatical. Basicly if you want to crunch videos and DVD's then get an Intel. For everything else, AMD.

Check this out, and look att he next 8 pages. This is a very good website for hardware reviews, testing and benchmarks.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041019/athlon64_4000-08.html

Both CPU's are awesome.

However, for specific tasks, one excels and the other whomps.

For what you want to do, AMD, there is no other when it comes to gaming.

If you interested in multi-media like non-linear video editing or photoshop or video encoding, Intel is your thing.

I have both platforms and can tell you from experience that for gaming, even the intel p4 extreme editions (which go for 1000+) can't compare with a a64 fx-55 which goes for about 800-900 bucks.

However, when I do mpeg encoding, intel excels and even AMD's flagship card a64 fx-55 is beaten by an older Intel p4 3.2E.

As for the 64-bit thing, unless you have XP 64-bit (which is free btw), the 64-bit is totatly useless. Even if you have Xp-64, programs must be actually written to use 64-bit and very few programs exist that are coded for 64-bit. In addition, there's only 1 game out now that even takes advantage of 64-bit and accordng to multiple benchmarks, the performence increase is marginal.