Anyone with one of these systems care to comment.
I've heard so much about so little fromt the Phenom II class CPUs. Are they quite a bit faster, or not so?

I keep hearing about game performance, but when is that not the case for "God Moders". I'm interested in the Linux areas, especially installation, and of course compiling.

I could care less AMD or Intel. I want to chip what is the best for the price. I will soon buy a phenom 940 or core i7 920. The chip fastest at compiling software is what I want. I run gentoo so compiling software is my top concern.

I just looked at specs for a 940. Man is that thing fast! But, since I've got a 9750, it's going to be a long time before I do another upgrade.

I love my 940, it overclocked easily to +3.6ghz on air cooling, staying >50*C at full load. It is SIGNIFICANTLY faster then my 9950 OC, or my 6400 OC. I'd almost wait until the higher end AM3 chips(820+) are more readily available and the better motherboads for them though, if I were you. Hopefully it'll only be a few months, although I really haven't researched it, don't have the time. Good luck!

OK, so the 940, being quad Deneb core, is fast.

Another thing I've been curious about is the front-bus, which on the Deneb seems to be 3600MHz. How does this affect things like HD and removable storage? Is the performance gain dramatic, or is it left untapped with certain configs.

I'm not really an overclocker, but I understand that the AMD CPUs are good at this.

Thanks for responding, and I'll look into some of the lower end Phenom II's, as I understand even the X3's are faster than their Intel counterparts.

For the past few years (since Intel's Core 2 parts at least) AMD have been worse at overclocking than Intel. The Ph IIs are the first AMD parts for quite some time that have challenged Intel in the overclocking area.

...depends what you mean by counterparts. In the mid range, price for price (and particularly system price for system price), the AMD parts are easily competitive with Intel. This is not true at the high end, where is Intel is the clear leader.

Yeah, as far as cranking the CPU, but I was referring to overall stepping up including RAM, and System Bus. Where the AMD set, as far as I had heard, was still first. On my current box, I can manipulate RAM-bus speed, but I've never chosen to. Too many errors, and hackers tend to due that enough for me, anyhows.

I know Intel doesn't offer a three core CPU, and many pundits downplay the X3's as twerked out four-core CPU's. Since AMD just disabled a non-functioning CPU on many of the Phenom X3's. I was referring to the price range. Where, as of late, I noticed the Phenom X3 had an offering in the sub $100 range. Where the nearest Intel performance in that area is a Core 2 Duo, and I hear that the Phenom is the better performer.

You'll have to look at the whole package (well - at least mobo,CPU and RAM) for what better suits your budget.

I would concern myself whether AMD or Intel is printed on the box at that point.Whatever is faster at within your budget is better.

There are more important things to consider than the make like:

If you got a 2 core cpu and a 3 or 4 core cpu at the same price the 2 core is likely higher clocked and will give you better performance on single threaded applications and 90% of all games.

Since I'm a definite casual user, budget is prime-most. I could care less of the gaming rigs, with dual-video capabilities. Eeking out just one more FPS and crying when their system becomes unstable.
AMD does offer the lower-end of the price spectrum, but has the advantage of better Linux support.
I'm no gamer, just listen to a lot of peoples: "Row, row row your Boat, you're "Dream Boy"", types

Games, do something else with your life man...or someone else's for that matter...

What do you mean with 'better Linux support'?

But I'll have to agree that being in the US you'll probably get better bang for the buck out of AMD at the time if you don't overclock.

I am in Brasil - meaning computer related things are expensive as hell (even the the illegal imports).
For that reason it made perfect sense for me buying an Intel E4300 to run it at 3 ghz because it overclocks w/o an hassle.
If I was in the US I would have a totally different box.

BTW: there is a typo in my original post.Reads:

I would concern myself whether AMD or Intel is printed on the box at that point.

Should read:

I wouldn't concern myself whether AMD or Intel is printed on the box at that point.

It doesn't seem like performance on games is a concern for the OP. I'm not sure whether we'll find out if his workloads are primarily single threaded or not but for today's desktop usage scenarios, more than two cores often does little to speed things up, whereas clock speed more often speeds things up.

I'd still argue that in an overclocking competition, a carefully chosen Intel System would win; not as clearly as it would have prior to the introduction of the geometry-shrunk Ph IIs by any means, but it still would be ahead. But this doesn't seem to be a concern to the OP.

Things like the hard disk are primarily limited by how fast the mechanics move around, so the 'front-bus' (which the AMD parts and the newer Intel parts don't have) isn't a factor.

If you really mean 'Isn't getting a very fast CPU and still having to put up with a hard disk subsystem that hasn't increased in speed a bad idea?', then the answer is no.

The hard disk speed will still affect opening of applications, saving data and swapping, but if you have enough memory, swapping ought to hardly occur. So the only issue is opening applications/saving data and you just have to realise that in desktop usage that is so little of your time that it isn't a real problem.

If the OP really doesn't care about games, in his position I would be going for one of the AMD chipset boards with onboard video; this implies an AMD processor, but saves cash over a separate video card.