Beg pardon? I'm 60 years old and have a lot of hands on experience. I don't go by all the charts, reading tea leaves, voodoo, and other mindless dribble posted on the internet. I go by my experiences. I like Intel because it does what I want it to do. I like EVGA and XFX video cards. Great performance for very reasonable cost. Does that make me a fanboy of one of those products? Of course not. It makes me a smart, tech savvy system designer.
There will always be the debate about who makes the better product. Only thing I can say in earnest is to shop carefully. There is an incredible amount of junk out there. Be careful.
As for me...
I've used Intel for every scratch build since day one. Last time was a DP35DP mother board and a core2duo @ 2.4ghz. The DP35DP is still rated as one of the best Intel mother boards.
For this build I went DZ77GA-70K for the mother board @ $219.00. The cpu is a i5 3570K 4 core unlocked @ $229.00.
The OP doesn't have to go the case and power supply I used as it was admittedly a bling bling thing.
To the OP. For 800 clams you can get a decent mother board and cpu, 8 gigs of ram, and a killer hard drive. Add a good power supply and a cheap case and you'll still be inside your budget. But you need a good graphics card and they can cost more than you gave for the mother board. My build so far is running $1150.00 and I'm not done yet. BUT By building your own system you can swap out parts and add on as the need arises. Prebuilts pretty much tie your hands as to what you can do with them down the road.
And here's some food for thought. AMD does not have built in thermal protection. It depends on the temp sensors in the mother board to protect it from thermal overload.
Intel on the other hand has built in thermal protection. When an Intel cpu chip hits it's high limit it will throttle back 50%. If it's still running hot it will shut down. Your 229.00 dollar investment will survive to compute again. Your 110.00 dollar AMD will fry itself forcing you to have to buy another one.
