I'm going through that same debate right now. I'm shopping for an HTPC that doubles as as light gaming rig and I've found that the i7 Sandy Bridge processors are that much faster to make the AMD processors almost a irrelevancy. From what I gather, a 2.8 gig i7 is just as fast as a 3.0 to a 3.2 AMD. Plus they are easily over clocked and some come with "turbo" scripting which temporarily overclocks them when the power boost is needed. The AMDs will get the job done, but it really comes down to the issue of money versus power. My current rig runs an AMD (2.7 double core, 4 gigs ram, and 750 gig HD) and I have no probs with ableton. I use mine mostly for DJing purposes so I won't have a lot of multiple programs running at once. I'm not an authority on hardware at all, so take what I have said with a grain of salt.