appreciate all posts and inputs about both CPUs

looking forward to sharing this journey with a new high-performance workstation powered by Intel Core 2 Duo Conroe

Kuphryn

Intel Core 2 Duo Conroe E6600 (2.4ghz) CPU is fast

New system compiles multiple software projects while processing media (DVD, divx, and audio, etc.) at the speed of light. (500% improvement) Multiple cores CPU significantly improves performance of multithreaded software architectures.

Kuphryn

Currently Core 2 Duo (Allendale E6300, E6400) and Conroe(E6600, E6700, X6800) beat everything at everything. They actually don't benefit from WinXP 64 (vs regular Windows XP) at all, in some cases performing worse in XP64. Not sure how things are in Linux. The cheapest Core2 is the E6300 at aroun d $200US. Motherboards that are compatible with Core2 are still relatively expensive. Kentsfield is coming soon to the same socket (Socket T/LGA775). Kentsfield will be quad core. Kentsfield will be very expensive. (Expect to pay around $800US for the cheapest option.)
939 may not offer much of an upgrade path, but you can get a 165 Opty for like $250 now.
AM2 is not bad, AMD is supposed to release a die-shrink of their A64's later this year. We'll see what that brings. K8L is coming next year, expect it to be AMD's 65nm quad-cores. There is a good chance that they will work with AM2 motherboards. I'm considering buying a solid AM2 board (Crosshair) and a cheap A64 and upgrading next year to K8L myself.

I disagree because not a lot people understand the scale of both AMD AM2 chips and Intel Core 2 Duo chips. AMD processors uses 90 nm and Intel Core 2 Duo chips uses 65 nm. Of course the Intel processor will be faster and probably a better overclocker, but AMD chips are actually more efficient with energy. If AMD moves over to 65 nm scales, the energy consumption will be a lot lower than Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe).

Good luck on buying and figuring out how the bells and whistles works in Linux with the the Crosshair motherboard. I recommend not buying junk food as the motherboard.

What were you disagreeing with? I didn't intend to make any statements about public perception of these CPUs, only the facts as they are. Also - a die shrink doesn't necessarily mean improved performance at all: look at the Presler chips. They certainly ran much cooler than P4's, and had much lower power draw, but didn't have better performance, and wattages were still higher than A64s at the time. Core 2 has significantly improved performance per clock cycle, better than any other desktop CPUs, and for the first time in years, lower wattage than the A64s as well. AMD's die shrink may turn the tables, or not. I'm hoping so, as my hardware investments are counting on AMD performing their promised miracles over the next 12 months.
Figuring out the bells and whistles will hopefully be a rewarding challenge - I seek to prove to myself and others that one can build a good open source gaming machine. I still keep hoping that Nvidia will release AMD64 FreeBSD drivers though. The junk food analogy is completely lost on me, sorry.