Been an AMD fan just because of the price point. Running a Dual core Phenom II black editon 3.1ghz. I really like it. 4 gigs of ram with win7 32bit for the same reason as you (64 bit causes more issues than it solved for me.
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I would like to upgrade to the quad core CPU now that they have higher clock speed ones out there. running an 8800GT OC also. Quite nice.
Haven't kept up for a while on the processors. doing some reading now also. but the i7 does look like a great chip... almost makes me want to make an intel setup if i had the cash.