I was all about AMD up until my Phenom II X4 965. When it came time to replace it, I looked into the FX series CPUs. After lots of reading, it seemed Intel was a better choice, both in performance and keeping temps down.

Precisely. I may well have a dodgy part but I have never seen any of my cores over the 3.2GHz into "turbo" territory as AMD seem to suggest in all their marketing that they will -- which puts me off AMD for a start.
Then there's the ridiculous situation of AMD not quoting a real maximum temperarture for the CPUs leaving customers trying to find out which value is the "critical" one. When I say "critical" by the way I do so as, apparently, should it rise above 55[C?] for any significant time (two minutes, six hours?) It will be damaged, probably, they think. Add to that the fact that using anything but he stock cooler invalidates the warranty and their you go...
Sorry, the above is a rant which is based upon my own experience and research and may well be wrong.

Amd, Intel, etc. to me didn't mean a lot for quite a while, because Linux worked fine on all of them. I may still end up doing something with that AMD FX processor, in the Windows box I have, just because I don't enjoy gaming like I once did. (was a different story when I was younger and my group of friends got together) There is only one piece of Windows software, that isn't a game, that I never found a Linux replacement for. (not enough Linux woodworkers)

A couple of reasons I decided to go with Intel. I can see myself wanting to play with virtual machines at some point (and the processor and chipset I was looking at, supported it). The wattage of the CPU's I wanted (lower wattage tends to run cooler and I don't expect my average pc use, to need a lot of speed. Lastly I found a motherboard (not the chipset I wanted), that I found acceptable, NIB around $25 (damaged freight resale store).
I'd love to go with the T processors (35 or 45watt), but to find the I7, is a PAIN and it isn't retail, so they tend to overprice them (higher then Intel's MSRP). I could go with the T in the I3 or I5, but I see this as a long term computer. I think I am down to the 4790S, 65 watt processor (the average estimated cost difference in power, would make it approx 8 years to payback the I7T over the S) But I will believe it when I have bought it (I may freak out on the cost verses my use and just stay with a lower I3 when I am in the checkout line).

Using Intel B960 Processor with 2GB Ram.
Uses on average doesn't go beyond 10% of my total processing power of dual core CPU and RAM usage around 1.5GB unless I open several apps with several windows.

I am running KDE 4.14 on this system.

I ended up going with AMD back in the socket-7 days. I had a Pentium 233MHz, that I could only overclock (with jumpers) to 266MHz using 3.6v. With the same mainboard, I replaced the Pentium with an AMD K6-III+ 450Mhz. Overclocked it to 550Mhz, and with only 2v. Oh, and it was cheaper than the Intel too. That machine still works today.

I have a dual processor HP Z600 with 2 x5650's 2.66 6 cores, 24GB, and GTX 750. My Lappy is a Dell Latitude E6500 T9550 C2D, 4GB, Quadro 160M

Intel i5, 16GB memory --> then disable memory swap file. No memory problems whatsoever. With heavy usage, still $free -h shows a few GB free.

Oddly, I found that I needed a proper cooler and even ended up with an FX8370 and a noctua cooler running the CPU at 4.6

I have 2 machines: one FreeBSD workstation and one FreeBSD build server. The build server used to be my workstation but due to its noise, heat and some video issues, I have retired it to a headless status and built a new box.

Workstation:
Intel i7 7700k 4 core (8 threads)
32 GB DDR4 RAM

Build server:
Intel Xeon X5550 (2 x 6 core CPUs) (24 threads)
96GB RAM

The most RAM I have used on the workstation is about 16 GB maybe, and was during a package build. I don't do that anymore and use the build server to, well, build. The most ram I use on the workstation now is maybe just over 1 or 2 GB if I have a lot of applications and documents or photos open. CPU usage I have no idea but I am pretty sure it is just twiddling its thumbs most of the time. I use fluxbox and it's very light on resources.

On the build server, the most I have used is about 50GB during a package build. That was building close to 1000 packages, to include chromium, firefox, libreoffice and several compilers: llvm, gcc, plus some heavy compile deps like rust.

When the build server is working, it is building in parallel so normally all 24 "cores" are pegged at 100% for about 2 or 3 hours. CPU temps hit 75-78 degrees Celsius.

I must add that even though both machines have very small swap partitions (500mb to 1gb), neither machine has ever hit swap.

You have swap?! Sorry, yes, at one point I did have swap set up just in the unlikely event that I missed a process leaking but, with a desktop and conky running all the time, I disabled my swap file long ago.

I don't need it, just an old habit I guess. I could reclaim some disk space I suppose but that's not an issue either because I have more than I'll ever use. So, my brain doesn't prioritize getting rid of swap and it stays out of complacency

@SevendogsBSB:
That is some server you got!

I have 16GB to prevent swapping, and it will make my SSD last me my whole life I hope =). Samsung SSD EVO 1TB.
About 5% used if I install and upload every music file I own so far. Yes, I do not own a lot of music. Mostly 16-24 bit flac files.
I used to hate swapping, i just like snappy and fast systems...

It's really a workstation (HP z800) and was originally used for CAD or 3d rendering. It doesn't make a practical workstation though because it is a bit loud, runs hot and has an 1100 watt power supply, making it pretty energy inefficient...

My new workstation is dead silent in comparison, which I really love. Low wattage CPU and a huge Noctua fan which for its size makes virtually no noise.

All of my music (flacs as well) is on my NAS and I NFS mount a shared directory to my PC so I can listen while I work.

I have Samsung EVO SSDs on my PC as well - great drives but mine are much smaller because i don't keep much data on the PC: all multimedia is kept on the NAS.