As an example I have a 1.67 Ghz AMD Athlon(2000+) and a 900 Mhz Athlon setup as a renderfarm An animation I did with just the 900 Mhz took about 10 hours to render, with both it only took 5. So definitely I'd say that AMD's are better chips for much lower price although they tend to run hotter than Intel chips of the same speed. That's easily fixed by proper ventilation. As everyone has said if you are going to spend that kind of money it's best to build another computer. If you do some serious gaming those high priced accessories may help but then most games don't even use all the features of the top of the line cards.