i've never had either one crap out on me (except this one time when i didn't have the heat sink mounted)

If you want longevity though, don't buy the top of the line one of either brand. It's running at nearly max tolerance and the slightly cheaper ones have room to spare in their operation, meaning that they aren't being stressed. And frankly the prices of the processors on the top-end are nearly equal nowadays anyway. The difference in price of a system is no longer because of the processor. For some reason Intel-compatible motherboards are much more expensive. I suspect it's because of the memory controller. AMD has it on-chip.