Ratz, why should I care about damn HTT if there is no noticeable difference. Intel beat AMD in all other cases. I'm not fanboy, there were good times for AMD too, but actually Intel offer is much better.

Riku, take E8500.

that was in pentium era, they got core2 now which is clock for clock faster then amd in most cases.
but when it comes to huge data transfer like in winrar or certoun games, the core2 starts to fall back.
amd has the htt bus which allows them to communicate much much faster with peripherals and also can act as cpu interconnect.
thats why amd is still leader in 4p market where intel just cant keep up.
if you have a slow dual core intel and you got things in the background running, you might notice lags in quake. amd wont have this as much as intel.
also with heavy gpu load, the intel cant feed the gpu constant data where amd can, so some have reported the amd chips perform some games smoother then intel. same situations have been reported in windows responses.
but since intel is faster clock for clock and clocks higher, they can compensate for this alot.
nehalem will change all this but tests have shown that there isnt much to gain like peope think. and is extremely expensive.

amd has released a new 5400be, unlocked multi, probably oc's to 3.2ghz on air easy(released 2 weeks ago). costs 70 while the 8500 costs 140 euro and clocks to 4ghz and beyond if you are lucky. so intel is faster but costs more. or buy a cheap intel dual core and clock to 3.5+ghz.

4870x2
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=198126

4850 and 4870
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=192421

if you got a shitload of money, go for 8500.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14424/6

nice

*updated my post ^
as you can see, 50 fps to 70 fps for the 8500 above amd.
but you must pay 2 times more.
thats why people often say amd is better bang for buck.

It's ok. You can also go for HD 4870 without X2 if you want save some money. Which series of OCZ are you talking about? I'd rather take G.Skill PQ.