AMD or INTEL?

This is in reply to a comment from yesterday asking who is better AMD or INTEL, its not really a question of who is better since both manufacturers have a good product, but a matter of what works for you better with whatever you use your computer for, I know for instance that some pc based video surveillance (DVR) cards don't play nice with AMD and other things that just don't work with INTEL. But I do have one complaint with INTEL even if it is a minor flaw, their method of securing the CPU heatsink could use a lot of work.
those little plastic things tend to break. this picture is of an aftermarket heatsink but it has the same plastic clips as the OEM fan that had failed on mine.


Here is an AMD AM2 heatsink you can see the mounting hardware they use, the motherboard has a bracket screwed in place and the heatsink has a metal retaining system.


Here is an INTEL setup that has failed you can see the bottoms of the 4 plastic pins they use and note the red circle as this one is broken. this caused the system to overheat and fail over time.I took 4 small screws and nuts and replaced the plastic clips on one intel heatsink and that seemed to work fine. My INTEL system is what I use for games as it seems to out perform the AMD's in some games but INTEL seems to cost more than AMD for comparable CPU's.

XFX 8200

I built a computer for someone back a few months ago with an XFX Geforce 8200 motherboard and a Phenom x4 cpu, at first everything was fine but after a few weeks it began acting up. It even fragged the Linux kernal on one install, it had multiple problems listed in the logs most of which led to the cpu.After giving it some thought I got a new Asus motherboard identicle to mine I use every day and bought an Athlon 64 X2 7550 cpu. I swapped the motherboard out and put the XFX one with the new cpu in my second computer I use for my personal weather station and stuff because I wanted to get to the bottom of the problem, Well its been about 3 weeks and so far I have had no problems at all with it. The CPU I put in it is a screamer it has the KUMA core and 3 MB cache. I even overclocked it some to try and get it do do something but so far its been running fine and I even like the motherboard and its features. I also put 2 GB of the OCZ SLI memory in it and that even works like a charm. After not finding anything wrong with my new setup I decided to just keep it and see how things go. That left me with a pile of spare parts laying about so I built a Frankenputer with all of it and handed it off to my youngest son.