It wasn't even close. After reading the round-by-round account of our dual-core desktop CPU prizefight, it should come as no shock that AMD's Athlon 64 X2 chips are the runaway victors here, laying out the Intel Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition 840 chips pins up. If we had to call out one chip, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is an outstanding bargain given the competition, but as our results show, any AMD dual-core CPU will serve you better than its similarly priced Intel equivalent. It just stuns me that Intel was the company that Apple tapped to provide processors. As one who uses their computer for entirely high-end graphics crunching, I insisted on an AMD-based pc when I left the sinking Apple/Mac ship.