In your opinion, should I go with the quad core and spend more on ram and cooling system, or should I go with a basic i7 and accessorize down the road?
My opinion? i7-920. Here's a thread with some benchmarks from last January:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15035Intel is releasing their next major chip (6-core i9/gulftown) early next year on socket 1366. If you get an i7-920, you can upgrade to a 6-core i9 without having to spend $300-$400 replacing the ram and motherboard as well. The i9 will have some additional instructions to make encryption faster, supports virtualized 16-bit real mode and other v12n tweaks.
Better virtualization performance. Even if you think it'll be a gaming box, you're probably going to be messing around with virtualization a bit. An i7 (or AMD processor) will be faster for that.
i7 motherboards are targeted at the high-end market segment, so they are more likely to support the latest and greatest features... things like usb3, sata3, and more ports of various kinds on the back panel.
It boils down to whether the extra performance of an i7 is worth a $250 premium ($150 for a kit of 3x 2GB ddr3 sticks, and roughly an extra $100 between the motherboard and the cpu).
If you get a quad core2 like the q9550 and spend the entire $250 difference on a better graphics card, the quad core2 will probably perform better
for games.
AMD vs Intel: AMD was winning in performance from 2003-2006. Then Intel came out with the core2, which was 64-bit and beat athlons for typical workloads. The one area where AMD remained superior was in memory handling and virtualization, since AMD has been using on-die MMUs since the athlon64. Intel's nehalem architecture (i7) finally caught up in that area, so there's no longer a compelling reason to choose one brand over the other.
