AMD has been out of the running for the last couple of years. Intel pretty much took the lead with their Core2 duo and quad chips and AMD was left in the dust. Currently the only reason to buy AMD is if you are looking exclusively at cost instead of performance.

Here's the last page of a Phenom II X4 article at Tom's: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-ii-940,2114-24.html

Phenom II will work in a socket AM2+ board running DDR2 or a socket AM3 board running DDR3. This CPU can't compete with a Core i7 but probably is competitive with the previous generation Core quads.

Rob Mack

Intel got embarrassed when Athlon was kicking their butt. So they went home, worked out, and came back to the beach to open a can of whoop ass on AMD.

Intel doesn't have an I7 @ the 940's price (newegg: $220). Closest I7 is ~$290. It's also pretty close to the Core 2 9550. BUT... that's ~$280.

So for the price... it's faster per $$. Odds are you'd be seeing seconds between rendering times between the two. Plus if you already support a Phenom CPU on your AM2+ you support this (like me). I wouldn't recommend spending the extra $70 on a slightly faster CPU. Buy an extra 500gb hd space instead.

After looking over another article at the anandtech site (http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=3521) it appears that you could flip a coin to choose between a Phenom II and a Core 2 Quad. At that point I'd be looking at motherboards and chipsets.

Chipsets are very important because that's where most of a motherboard's features are supported. So if you want dual PCIe x16 (or x8) slots that's determined by the chipset, as is the number of SATA connections, the presence of eSATA ports, onboard RAID, GB ethernet, etc, etc.

Personally, I think I'd favor an Intel chipset and that means using an Intel CPU. But I haven't really read much about the most current nvidia and AMD chipsets.

One thing you might consider is upgrade paths. With the presence of Core i7 I wonder how much life is left in a Core2 platform? Maybe a Phenom II on a motherboard supporting DDR3 has more legs than Core2. Then again, Core i7 supports lots of RAM and adding memory is probably the easiest (and most likely) upgrade path you could ask for. Because the Core i7 is at the top of the heap right now I kind of think this would keep you happy the longest and maybe be cheaper in the long run.

I built a machine with a Phenom X4 9950 BE.
I haven't really tried anything with audio and video yet.
From what I've read the Phenom II isn't a noticeable improvement over the previous architecture.

Thanks everyone for all of your input.
I've decided to go with the Phenom II x4 940.
After reading all the articles,reviews and looking at the benchmarks, I decided it was the better choice per performance and cost.
The Core I7 920 does surpass the phenom II x4 940 hands down, but building a system on it does not come cheap.
The performance margin when it comes to content creation, is not so extreme that I can't deal with it .

I'll be able to use the extra money for more hardware. ;-)

-Vegasmon