I used to be a diehard AMD guy, but lately Intel is better in almost all respects (efficiency, power, overclocking, gaming, encoding) the only advantage AMD still holds is that their memory controller is integrated onto the die so in certain applications that are memory latency sensitive they can have a small edge.
AMD is very price competitive, so if a budget system is your goal an AMD chip can be a very good choice (just make sure you pair it with a decent motherboard (Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, MSI).