We were having a bit of an argument over intel/amd at work today during a slow time. My manager said that AMD has always been better and will be even batter when the AMD quad core comes out... I told him that right now Intel is in the lead, another guy was along with me saying Intel was out ahead atm. Kinda interesting anyway that something like that pops up during a downtime working at a fast food restaurant.
Anyway, right now I would go with Intel. You said you were on a budget though, so it might be a wiser chose to go AMD and save yourself a bit of money. Someone else may have better advise though as the only 3 AMDs I've owned is an AMD K6, Duron 900MHz, and an Athlon XP 2GHz. None of which were my main PC. Still got the Duron, but the mobo for it died 1 day after I got it (got it free used). So, not much experience w/ AMD here...