Intel i5 or AMD Phenom II X4?

You have to look at the real world performance difference. it all looks good on paper. say a movie encoding and decoding times on i5 vs amd... u hav to look at the times it takes for the conversion by those processors vs the money u pay...a diff of a few secs is no big deal..bt the money ur payin for the reduction in time matter's. at the moment intel is ahead in terms of performance but it's not very huge difference in real world. it all comes out to the money you are spending