The first is price. AMD has the upper hand here. Although its Phenom II X4 940 is priced fairly close to Intel’s Core i7 920, 790GX-based motherboards cost in the neighborhood of $150, while high-end X58 platforms generally tend toward $300 (although we’ve recommended a $250 model here). DDR3 memory is still significantly more expensive than DDR2. Populating three channels, the more modern technology is going to bear a notable premium over two channels of the more mainstream type. In all, the Phenom II machine costs about $250 less to build than our i7 box did, while arming the AMD platform with a better aftermarket cooler would have shaved $50 or so from its advantage.

Next is performance. Intel maintains its advantage in this one, even with both configurations overclocked. We very effortlessly achieved a 3.8 GHz overclock on the i7 920 by bumping its Bclk up to 190 MHz and keeping all other settings in place. Knowing that our own German lab was able to reach 3.8 GHz stably on air (and AMD’s lab team said to expect frequencies up to 3.9 GHz at 1.55 V), we pushed our X4 940 extremely hard. While we were able to boot at up to 3.8 GHz, benchmarks wouldn’t finish consistently until we had dropped down to 3.64 GHz—and that was still at 1.6 V. Anything less and even that speed wasn’t 100% solid. Given the speeds we were able to achieve, Intel’s entry-level Core i7 walked away from AMD’s fastest Phenom II in all but one test.

Third, you have power. We’re giving this one to AMD, as well. At idle—where you’ll spend most of your time—the overclocked Phenom II spins down to 800 MHz and yields some impressive power figures. Once it shoots back up to 3.64 GHz, it’s sucking down more juice than Intel’s 3.8 GHz Core i7. However, we anticipate that most enthusiasts aren’t going to peg their chips at redline very often.