I will contribute with a little experience here. from a longtime intel fan, who realized he got screewed by buying P4's all the time, and switched to AMD.
And he had his X2 for soo long, and he now bought a PHII. so lets take the price. its at 9000 NOK (900 quid, uk pounds) , which is like nothing for a system that runs games like that.
PH II 940 running stock. stock cooler.
4870X2
Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5
Crucial ballistix pc8500.
Antec sonata 3. changed psu to Pc power & cooling 750W
And a samsung drive @ 1tb.
And well, he runs 1680x1050, and he havnt seen a game lagg yet, other than crysis with AA and Cryostasis(which needs either 4870x2CF or GTX295, and physx graphics card to run smooth at max.
and he is soo pleased, and he have had his system for a while now.
He couldnt have built that system cheap without the PHII, it would have gotten 100-200 uk pounds more expensive with intel core 2 or core 7. and would not have given a better experience!
So do you game, not a bad choice, but its up to you, and how the pricing is in youre country, ati is hilariously cheap over here, while its other way round in other countries.
No wonder why amd is taking a piece of the cake, those tricores are just amazing for their price
They are also fun to oc, but not fun to do encoding at, maybe it changes in near future, would be cool with better compotition all across the board
Core 7 is still a masterpiece of a cpu though.