For contrast, I've seen pretty good demonstrations that almost across the board show athlon kicking the poo outta pentium. On the other hand, OS and drivers are almost exclusively developed for intel chipsets, meaning that, while rare, the places the amd chipsets aren't the same can cause problems. In my experience, home users who are willing to risk minor stability issues for performance are better served by AMD chips, but businesses who can't afford the risk of downtime on their systems tend to go with the names they can rely on, ie. Intel for chips, HP for servers, etc. It's not that they don't care about performance, they don't want the small risk of having a complication, and need the reassurance of a formidable corporate troubleshooting and customer service department. Paul