As people have pointed out, the shorter pipeline and integrated memory controller work very well for gaming on the AMD Athlon 64 range - assuming of course you have a decent graphics card to match it.
The Pentium 4 is fine for gaming.. not quite as high fps but still perfectly playable, however with hyperthreading tech, Windows does respond quicker and handle more tasks at once.
On the Dual Core side, initially AMD has had the performance advantage but the newly released Pentium 65nm chips have again closed the gap more or less.
Price wise the AMD A64/Opteron 939 range are very good value. For example: A64 3800+ is £170 inc VAT however their dual core range is much more pricey, e.g. 4600+ DC is £458 inc VAT. On the Intel side the P4 3.4GHz is £199 inc VAT and the dual core 3.4 is £469 inc. So you can see the dual core chips are reasonbly closer than single core.
Overclocking: Both AMD and Intel's overclock well. The Opteron range is favourable as it boasts the extra 512k cache and most run happy at 2.8 to 3.0GHz. The updated Intel dual cores have also had good results, with the 3.4 XE running at 4.2GHz on stock air cooling alone.
[Death] said:
Games = AMD, Video etc = Intel
Roguey said:
cos its faster for gaming
Why the pointless posts?