AMD Phenom II x4 955 v Intel i7 920

[linkclub]

The sphere of craziness that is the consumer home computing market has always been a hard one to follow for me. I have a passing interest, but find it hard to keep up what with my other interests - but mainly the pace that it moves at.

As it changes so rapidly - fast enough as to render one blink of respite the (virtual) equivalent of 10 years in cryogenic suspension - I often find myself drifting away and having to relearn everything from scratch after only a couple of months out of the loop.

And in that time, my (once) shiny new PC has also depreciated considerably. :naughty:

I guess my question is, which new processor should I go for?

I am building a mid-high end gaming rig (based on nVidia's GTX 295 solution) and I wonder if anybody has any experience of AMD Phenom II's or Intel i7's.

The AMD P2 x4 955 is not out yet - the 940 was the previous contender from AMD for my affections, but on the announcement of the faster (clocked 3.2Ghz) 955, I naturally lost interest in the 940.

And then we have the bottom-end i7 920, which by all accounts is in a similar price bracket to AMD's offering, but is supposedly a better performer even though it is clocked lower at only 2.6Ghz.

What confuses me is when I read reviews telling me that although benchmark performance if the i7 chip beats the AMD chip, the real world performance of the AMD chip keeps up and in some cases betters the i7. :nuts:

So I am now confused and have no clear idea what to do; there are pro's and con's on both sides - not least that the price of an Intel system will be more as the DDR3 memory, motherboard, etc will all be more expensive than an AMD option - but with DDR3 compatibilty being offered by AMD's latest chip - I'm left even more confused.

Can anybody help me decide?

Thanks for reading! :happysad:

[Smith6612]

Personally I use an Intel i7 here in my rig. It's a nice chip, not as overclockable as the Core 2 Quad chips are but it does require DDR3 memory which I assume you know already. As per battling an AMD, you could look for some benchmarks online as I haven't used any AMD chips here for a little while now.