If your desktop is PURELY for gaming, most people recommend AMD.Their Phenom 2 series are probably what you want if you decide to go with AMD CPU's.After recent price cuts the AMD Phenom X3 720 is an extremely good buy -- and also very highly overclockable, if you're into that sort of stuff.If you use your desktop for things other than gaming and need the grunt for synthetics like video encoding, photoshop, CAD etc. the Core i7 is probably what you should get.Intel suits both purposes, but generally Intel CPU's are more expensive -- mainly because they have a monopoly on the high end CPU market.