I'm about to lay out some cash for a new machine and wanted to know which of these any of you may recommend. 

The reviews I read don't help very much.  Might as well ask people who use them.

Sidenote for you,

dramatic prizedrop for Q6700 in just a few weeks, down to about 220 dollars which at present is prize of the q6600.

I'm gonna check out the Phenoms but by intuition i don't think it'll be a burner.

Generaly for VUE, a quadcore is good for rendering.  The more Ghz the chip has, the faster it will render.  For rendering, cache is not used but for general computing like creating with VUE cache will be helpfull.

For a pure render box, Intel or AMD will do fine, as AMD has priced the Phenoms to be basically on the same price/performance curve as Intel.  The more U spend, the faster the chip will perfom.

For a single system for creating and rendering, I'd recommend either the Q9300 or Q9450, depending on how much $ you want to spend.  The new generation of Intels (Q9450 or Q9300) are faster by about 10% than the older generation (Q6700 or Q6600), and they consume less power than the top AMD (95W vs 125W).

I still favour the AMDs, but right now Intels are probably the way to go in terms of power efficiency and cost/performance.  I give AMD about 6 months to a year before they ramp up to match the Intel offerings in terms of power/performance.

My 2 bits.  Suggest you do some research at Anadtech.com, Tom's Hardware, and other techie sites.  Look for the rendering graphs - they are done with 3D Max, Cinema 4D, Lightwave or another 3D app, but the results apply to VUE as well.  The graphs allow you to compare the different chips to each other and see how they differ in terms of performance and cost.

Lots to read and ponder on...Good luck and enjoy the process.

Thanks for your advice.  :):)  I'll wait and see if the price comes down this month.

maximumpc is a good location for imput on the AMD against Intel quad cores.  Checkout the 02/08 edition, February. 

Personally I would wait till mid-year as the Intel X48 DDR3 1666 Mhz screamer will be coming out and knock the x38 1333 off the shelf.

Forgot to mention that issue also does a comparison of NVidia and ATI.