I think the general consensus right now is that at almost every price point, Intel is a better choice for a gaming CPU. AMD has some good choices for Video editing/rendering with inexpensive 8-core CPU's, but Intel pretty much takes the cake for gaming. Sometimes you can find a deal on an AMD that might be worth the decrease in performance however, and end up being a better value. Just have to shop around. It also depends on how serious you want to get about gaming. Most gaming is more GPU dependant than CPU, so you just need a CPU good enough to not bottleneck your GPU. A $75 AMD X3 might be good enough for a low end gpu., but you probably want at least 4 threads, a dualcore hypthreaded haswell would outperform most quadcores that are more than 2 generations old like my lynfield I5-750...but if your getting a GPU like a 7990, you definately want a nice CPU