Okay. Intel Pentiums are notorious for their heat production and TDP.
They guzzle upto 180W under stress connditions. The Dual core processors performed well. The Core duos performed still better. The core 2 duos took away the throne from AMDs.

But AMDs a designed with lower TDPs and operate much more stably than intels when used with different platforms. Intels are stable only on their own platforms.


On performance side the core2 duos perform much better than AMDs high end chips. I won't suggest you to go for Pentium Ds. Bad bad bad.

Depends on what you plan to do with the cpu amd are good but a 3200 may only run @ 1.8 to 3.2 ghz depending while a intel 3200 will run 3.2 ghz.
I believe intel are more stable & run cooler than AMD but AMD benchmarks on Games better but run hotter (so get a good cooling fan & heatsink both pentium / celeron d & intel dou / dual core / core 2 dou and amd x2 have 2 cores (but watch your front side bus and cache the higher the better but the more $ also) then You need a good stable mobo that supports the chip you get (I preffer asus & msi for Gamers and biostar / msi for home users)