It depends what you want to do, I decided that I want to play music while having 5 browsers open and burning a cd, while chatting on AIM and downloading at the same time, so I went with Pentium 4 3.0 ghz with 1 mb cache. Of course I can play Halfe Life 2, Doom 3, Cs: S, but an AMD 64 is mainly for gaming, I have a AMD 3200+ aswell, and I have to say for everyday uses my pentium based computer laps it 10 times. The point is, if you want a lot of applications running, get a pentium 4, if you're going to do some hardcore gaming then get a AMD.