intel truly is faster, but if i had the option i might take the amd cuz at their speeds both are beyong the required performance unless you're running multiplt gpu's and all, the only thing you personally will notice a true difference in is multitasking and en/decoding were amd takes the lead thaks to their extra cores, unless you putt a 200 buck 1100t against intel's 500-1k buck 6-cores running triple channel ram, which at that point, even thow the speed isn't worth the price, intel kills amd in every possible way, but in all these ways, the thing that makes it slower isn't even the cpu, it's the ram and the hdd that can't send the info fast enough for the cpu to be taken advantage of, that's why ssd'd make your comp faster, it sends more info to the cpu so the cpu can work at probably half of its potential speed truely.
Intel is not faster. Go and compare a Pentium with any Phenom II or Llano CPU. Intels top end is currently faster than AMD's top end is what you meant to say, Intel chips are not faster than AMD indefinitely.
Intel beats AMD chips quite neatly, even with equally priced chips in en/decoding, mostly down to instruction sets and architecture. You go and compare an i3 to a 955, and the i3 will take it, even with less cores. Think of it like this:
If you had 4 random blokes that you picked up off the street and asked them to build a house, and put them up against 2 professional builders, who would you expect to get it done quicker? Even with less people, the professionals would do it quicker because they know how to work together and they know the most efficient way to do things. This is similar to the processors. Even with less cores, the Intel chips are able to pull ahead performance wise in certain tasks.
Even with multiple graphics cards, a Phenom II 720BE or better CPU is able to plough through any game or task with ease. With certain things it may be slower than an Intel CPU, but most graphically intense processes, such as gaming, are not them
The CPU is sometimes bottlenecked by the hard drive and memory, however once the data has been loaded from the hard drive into memory, the hard drive is idle, that no longer affects performance. And memory isn't always the bottleneck. You can push your CPU to extremes whilst your memory is still relatively untaxed. Go and run a benchmark to see what I mean, or go and throw a low end CPU into even a mid range system then try to game on it, or do every day tasks, the CPU will be the bottleneck.
More on topic, I favour neither. As with everything else, I will always look at my budget and see what fits it best. I have had Intel and AMD, I have had Nvidia and ATi, I have had WD, Seagate, Samsung and Hitatchi, brand means nothing at all to me.
The only brand I have any sort of loyalty towards is Corsair, however even then I would take another brand should the price be right. The last system I built is such an example, Antec PSU, Kingston memory, Cooler Master cooler. No Corsair to be seen.
Both manufacturers have their merits and flaws, and anyone who tries to say differently is simply a fan boy
