Unshakable wrote:AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
Which would you have chosen? If you know of a better choice in that price range, please let me know. :-)
The choice isn't all that obvious. The AMD chip is very well priced, in fact I'd call it very cheap at that price - but to really shine it requires a threaded workload, which not all games (yet...) provide. The Intel chip is also much easier to overclock and has better motherboards available.
So, for overall performance and future games I'd probably pick the AMD, but for mainly playing WoW and the current generation of games I'd probably go for the Intel.
Although in reality I wouldn't ever be buying such a low end part, and if I for some reason was on a small budget I'd go for Core i5 - the price range starts a little higher but they provide incredible overclocking potential and overall value.