I3 vs Phenom II

[union23bj]

Hello everyone-I am officially a noob in here and I'm seeking insight due to the great computer minds in my life becoming suddenly unavailable. I am in the market for a new computer. I am a hip hop artist and I use my computer for multi-track recording(cubase,audition,FL,etc...) I've been doing this for many years, since having a P4 with a gig of Ram was top of the line and over the years I haven't moved much further. My wS pc is a 2.4gig single core Intel with 2 gigs of ddr ram, and it performs well for what is needed but its starting to crash out and I am going to do a upgrade with what I can find locally cheap. So my question is this--what is the better choice
3.20 Ghz Intel Core i3 processor
8gb DDR3 Ram

or
2.8 GHz AMD Phenom II X4 820 quad-core processor (with 6 MB shared L3 cache)----4gb ddr3 ram

same price--I'm asking this because I can remember a time when I heard it argued that the single core Intels were competing with low end dual AMDs--I've also heard alot of this Hyperthreading in the i3 being almost like a quad--please help me with this decision-I feel uninformed.---thanks in advance.