I'm thinking of building myself a workstation. I've always used AMD in the past, but I've heard that Intel has the edge at the moment.

I want to be able to do high end graphics stuff (including raytracing, which does not involve the video card) and scientific computing.

With these goals in mind, I'm looking for recommendations--AMD or Intel.

Also keep in mind that I'm on a poor grad student budget.

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I would get an intel core 2 duo, such as the e6400 or e6600. They are really great and powerful process and are in the ~200 range, which is awesome for the performance you get from them.

yea but if your going to go for those processors will need some nice ram, i would say 1GB min, and 1GB ram will only cost you about 40-50 quid from ebay

I used to be a hardcore AMD fan but since Intel came out w/ the Core 2 Duo chips I've been leaning towards Intel. However, if AMD comes out with their new x2 and x4 chips (don't know the code names off-hand) they may be able to edge out Intel.

The biggest difference right now is that AMD includes the memory controller in the CPU rather than having it in the Northbridge chip as Intel does. This will increase your performance in memory-intensive operations.

Regardless of what you decide to get, make sure it's a dual-core CPU, which means the Core 2 Duo (Intel) or x2 (AMD). The price isn't much more than single core chips but the performance increase can be quite large.

In the end, your choice of chip right now will be dictated by price. AMD is often cheaper but the cost/performance ratio is better than Intel; however Intel is currently considered #1 in terms of performance, with an associate price difference. And don't forget that the CPU isn't the main bottleneck; your various I/O areas (memory, disc, etc.) will slow you down more than the CPU.

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duo core works really well!