When it comes to odd crashes, there's a lot of occasions when it's not the processor at all, but faulty RAM...

http://www.memtest.org

Seriously. Check it out. There's not all *that* many situations where the AMD instruction set and chipset functions any differently than Intel, and I've heard an *awful* lot of musicians say that AMD chips perform a helluva lot better on audio applications.

There's a good reason Intel is adopting compatibility for AMD's x86_64 instruction set for their new Intel 64-bit processors. AMD has some very, very smart people working for them. :)

I've seen tiny glitches in RAM cause the strangest problems... like, runs fine for days, then locks at the worst possible time... definitely worth your ten minutes to check out. :)