They are better suited for gaming (...) Plus, Athlon chips are cheaper

I will not be purchasing AMD processors for gaming.

This is due to benchmarks I read which stated things like "Our AMD motherboard was only able to run the Quake3 Timedemo loop for an hour before the system locked up, whereas the Intel motherboard ran it nonstop all day..." , etc... I have seen statements like these in more than one place.

As I understand it, it's necessary to carefully match a given AMD motherboard with proper BIOS versions and drivers and only certain AGP graphics cards, and then only if you carefully set certain key flags in the BIOS setup screen. You can't just slap any old peripherals with any old BIOS and drivers into an Athlon board and expect them to work reliably.

I'm told that the only proper way to buy a gaming system with an AMD processor is to get a complete system from Falcon or Alienware. They have already done all the necessary leg work to get the drivers and BIOS tweaks all working together with all the popular game engines. This is fine, but since I piece my systems together, I don't intend to spend my LAN parties debugging my AGP aperture size setting and video ROM shadow addresses.

I've never had any trouble when piecing together systems based on an Intel motherboard, and I intend for it to stay that way.