I think you may be exagerating a bit, though I havn't come accross any of these articles you've read. When I was looking at reviews, everyone building serious gaming systems went AMD, because the price/performance ratio is so much better, and for plenty of things beat Intel. Now, if you're spending all your time ripping and encoding DVD's, you won't have a problem with the P4's 20+ stage pipeline, but if you try doing much else...

Do you remember what articles said they had problems with AMD processors? I'd be interested in seeing it because I've never heard that as a complaint about athlons... There's that whole thermal-diode issue with melting processors, but I don't think that's what your'e talking about.

Matthew