Ok well eevryone has their own likes and dislikes. I'm not going to go into how many systems I have built, lets just say I have gotten bonuses from my last job for completeing over 1200 in 2 weeks. Anyway heres my little take on this. AMD is nice, real nice if you are gaming and gaming only. The chips are built for it. The speed you mention on the chips are some what bullshit and heres why. When AMD tests their chips they over clock them to the highest they can get them and then tone them down a rung, this causes serious heating issues. I purchased one AMD chip in my life and will never go back to it again. The heat was so bad I had to place 4 fans in the box and they were so loud that I drove me nuts. I'm somone who likes to leave a system on 24/7 and with that system it was impossible the darn thing was in another room and I still heard it. It was like having a server in the room just a constant HUM of the fans to keep the thing cool. In the summer if you do not have AC you can come home to find your box shut off completely and wont turn back on for a few hours or you can just sit there an listen to it beep, beep, beep all day long warning you of overheating issues. I also had RAM issues with them, you can end up spending hours trying to get the correct cycles on your RAM so that your box wont lock up and in the end find yourself picking a lesser cycle in order to keep the machine stable. You will also find they are very touchy with chipsets, now most boards you buy are going to come with 1 of 3, via, sys, or intel. God help you if you place a AMD chip on a board with an intel chipset.
Ok now on to Intel. When they test their chips they 1st test for speed just like AMD but they drop their chip speeds down about 25% of what readings they get, so in a theory you can overclock a Intel chip to 25% over its boxed speed. IE you buy a 2.0 ghz chip you should be able to make it a 2.2/3 but once again thats just for gaming. Also the chips do not run hot, well not as hot as AMD. When I built this one I decided I was going to go all Intel. I wanted to see if there really was a differnce in performance and stablility. Intel board, chipset and main chip. I am proud to say I will never ever buy anything else again. All the parts where meant for each other and it shows. The box never locks up, never over heats and runs no less as fast as the day I built it. I can edit movies, play around with large files etc. All that comes from RAM. You can have a slow box but if you have enough RAM, would be surprised at how well it will do multimedia stuff. I would say no less then 1 gig these days.
Now as far as apps go. I never had or have issues with any apps I current run on this box. With my AMD I had issues with some multimedia stuff locking up and some games locking up. When I tested and working out the bugs it always ended up being a RAM issue. It just did not play well with the AMD chip. I have no idea why but in the end I spent over $600 replacing chip after chip till finnally a stupid cheapo stick worked best. lol Go figure.
If your looking for a good place to compair real world tests, not something that is done by the companies themselves look here
http://www.tomshardware.com/index.html
He had a really cool video up a long time ago when AMD started to make a really big push against Intel. He pulled the fan off of both processors and let them run for about 30 minutes, it was interesting to see smoke come from the AMD. I really never thought they would do that but they did. The AMD chip ended up getting so hot one of the wires inside the box caught on fire. This is not an every day thing, but what he was trying to point out is, if your processor fan goes bad with an AMD you can have a fire in your box/house. Not good.. Also on the fan notes, being you will need a really good one if you go AMD be preparred to drop any where from $60 to $100 for just the fan. Don't sound like much but in the end you can use that money for another drive or more RAM.
But that's my opinon and we all know what good that is. LOL. Hope this helps..Jugg