Step 2: Heat and Reliability

Cooling has always been the one major area where Intel processors were always considered to be far superior to AMD's offerings... remember the days of AthlonXP's going up in smoke? While the Socket 775 Pentium 4 heatsink architecture offers more room to grow, allows for larger heatsinks to be installed, and a bit more scalable in the long run, AMD's not totally out of step either. AMD has dramatically improved the shape, size and quality of heatsinks that it uses to keep Athlon64 processors running cool and quietly. With the de-emphasis of OEM processors, the company has better control over the retail heatsinks that come bundled with its Athlon64 processors, and hence the end user experience. So far, this generation of 'K8' heatsinks have been quiet running, and well designed so temperatures remain at acceptable levels.
To make things easier for the end user, heatsinks can be installed in any direction without damaging the processor. Back in the days of the socket A Athlon and AthlonXP CPU, if the heatsink was installed in the wrong direction you'd end up with a dead chip in under 4 seconds. In the unlikely event that the heatsink fan fails nowadays, that little tiny Athlon64 processor below will not cook itself to death. All current AMD processors employ thermal throttling which lowers the speed of the processor automatically should the CPU temperature rise too high.
On the whole, AMD and Intel are pretty even in thermal loads this year. From the consumers point of view it makes no difference if one processor or the other is used as both will operate reliably and quietly.