I have to say with regards to AMD vs Intel, I built my rig about a year and a half ago, originally 1.4GHz Xp1600+ CPUs/512MB RAM/etc and after using my old rig I was thoroughly impressed by the speed jump. At the time I wanted to go dual (if I hadn't I would have waited for the first batch of Barton CPUs).
I moved from a single Tbird to a dual XP system and the difference was pretty damn good. Not so much in games but I felt the SMP helped load times and the like. Most of that, however was probably me just feeling happy at having a new rig, I had the same sort of feeling of speed when I went from a 650 Duron to my 1100Tbird. The speed difference wasn't that noticeable, except in games.
Don't get me wrong, my rig is probably faster than many XPs at 2.4GHz (two 1.73GHz CPUs) and the like for encoding (not sure about P4s, as I'm sure they are quite a bit better than AMD for encoding) but really, the "OMG SO FAST" feeling for a large part was due to a fresh install and generally feeling happy with a new PC.
I'm glad you feel happy with your PC, and at the end of the day benchmarks to me could really matter less. I know my PC isnt the fastest around, but its fast enough for me, I can do what I need to do on it, with no hassle

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PS: Re: Senior Members
Sorry if anyone took offense to anything a senior member has said. We try make sure we avoid any flaming so sometimes if a senior member thinks a thread is possibly going to go downhill then they will often make a small post reminding people to keep things on topic. If someone has a problem with such a post it would be much appreciated if they could PM the senior member concerned. We've been around for a while, we do our best to help out, but we arent perfect. If we do post in a thread in such a manner as trying to avoid flaming then we do so because in our opinion it would benefit the thread. AMD vs Intel is always a discussion I keep my eye on as I have seen so many threads on the subject go downhill before.
CircuitBreaker: Enjoy your rig. If you can game, use your apps, whatever you use your PC for, then don't worry if other people dont like it, or have faster rigs. And whether you go for an OCed Pentium 4 machine or an Athlon64 you will have one hell of a fast rig, and should enjoy every minute you spend building, setting up, and using it.
