Doesn't look like he's into hardcore gaming. I say go with AMD, they get the job done for less. If you want to fork up some extra dough for an intel, then by all means do it, but my system runs fine on AMD, and despite what others will tell you, it multi tasks great. Sure, my benchmarks aren't as good as some other systems, but it doesn't look like you'll be worrying about benchmarks, either. Even my brother's single core 4000+ AMD multi tasks great, it even runs superpi's faster than mine. But it's up to you. I built an AMD pc because it saved me a bunch of money since the Core 2's were pretty new at the time and there was limited board selection for a reasonable price.