Some people think gaming is work.

Go with the Athlon. You're looking at performance that would beat a 3.4Ghz P4. The Athalon can run at a Lower Mhz yet still be faster because it's a better designed chip. As for the HT, that's hyper threading, it allows a processor to behave like two processors, this can be useful in some situations, but for things like gaming it would actually make your machine run slower. So HT is not a reason to buy a chip if you're looking at this as a gaming system.

Go with the AMD, his PC gaming friends will respect him more