It's always been AMD here as well. They're reliable and generally rated to clock higher than a similar Intel chip. They do run hotter though, and hotter usually means more cooling needed.... which in turn sometimes means louder fans if you don't shop carefully. This fan has finally driven me nuts, it's putting out about 28db, I just bought a replacement that claims to put out 16db while moving more cfm's. We'll see about that. ;) I also agree about the nVidia video card. Try to get one with at least 256 megs of memory on it. It makes a huge difference when doing anything graphics-intensive. And don't blow more cash than you have to, price the stuff at tigerdirect.com first. You can put your own system together for about half what it would cost buying one premade with similar specs. They also ship stuff out amazingly fast, two or three days is the usual wait. Man I love them. lol