I know what you mean ... I'm neither pro or anti AMD or Intel. Although I do have some grievances against VIA, but that's not processor-related!
I originally decided to give AMD a try. I liked the benchmarks, I liked the specs, I liked the price. And I wanted to avoid RDRAM if possible, because I like deciding for myself what kind of RAM I'm going to use.
Unfortunately, the system was unstable as hell, right from the beginning, and got it progressively worse as time went by. It turned out to be a combination of things, mostly power-related.
To make a long story short, the system finally committed suicide after eight months, despite the fact that I had replaced the video card, memory, and installed two additional power supplies, all in the name of keeping the darn thing running. No thanks to the warranty company, which did everything possible to ignore me. When the hard drive died ... I gave up.
In the meantime, I did a tremendous amount of homework on the subject ... partly in an attempt to locate the source of the problem, and partly in order to fight the Alienware technicians with verified data in hand. Eventually, this led to a long conversation with the CEO of the company, who agreed to replace the machine.
Obviously, I went the other route for the replacement, and chose an Intel platform.
I don't think that AMD is really going to make the kind of headway they need to dominate the market until they can afford to fabricate their own chipsets and motherboards without reliance on another company. Turning to VIA for the majority of the motherboards that shipped was just not a good idea. I think that it is likely that if I had been able at the time to purchase a system with an AMD chipset that full supported the Thunderbird, I'd still have the computer. In July of last year, that chipset didn't exist.
It's interesting to note that the CEO of Alienware admitted that there had been an unusual number of problems with these kinds of systems; everything from compatibility issues with other kinds of hardware, to actual damage to system components from faulty power leads on many early VIA boards. Not to mention the tons of problems people were having when playing games coupled with GeForce cards ... it was practically an epidemic.
And that's why my current computer is Intel. It's very stable, never locks up, plays every game I have installed, and allows me to USE the computer again, instead of forcing me to spend every single day troubleshooting something new. That can get very old after a while.
Toejam31
<font color=purple>My Rig:</font color=purple> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>