[Chicken Patty]

Phenoms in my opinion are great.

People rely to much on benchmarks nowadays. In super pi, my phenom does it in the same time with 2 cores, that 4, its only a little quicker on all four cores. Screw that, my old dual core is not even half way close to the performance of the phenom.

I think, and this is just my opinion, that honestly clock for clock, intels are quicker, but its not such a big margin. In games, and everyday use, browsing, extracting, etc. I don't notice a difference between my phenom at 3.1GHz and my buddies Q6600 at 3.6Ghz. Its a very solid CPU, mine did 3.4GHz right out the box, but I run it everday at 3.1GHz.

All I know is you won't be regretting it, and when the 45nm phenoms come out, you can just slap one on and not change anything else. On the other hand, if you have a LGA 775 (intel), you need to upgrade motherboard as well if you wanted to upgrade to the Nehalem lets say.