i avoid going for a cheapo i3 because amd was a much better value for money deal for me. except for the stock fan problem, everything has been fine. i spent 25K on: Asus MB (almost a premium category board) 7KAMD processor 10KCooler Master HSK 2K4GB DDR3 RAM 6Kthe intel processor i wanted was the quad core q6550 i think. the processor alone was around 16.5K.