I'm not sure what your question is. a budget box is AMD all the way, but Intel smokes the shit out of AMD these days in performance AND they use much less power.
The Core 2 Duo E6600 is the best buy imo, it will overclock to 3GHZ with stock cooling and it's just plain fast out of the box.
I wont buy any ATI cards until they get the driver issues fixed with Linux, they are getting better but ffs, they have shit drivers for windows so I'm not looking for any good support with Linux.
Nvidia all the way