Me and my friend kinda get into these little squalls about which game engine is better so I decided to ask you people which is better in power/features and user friendly the Unreal engine or the Source engine?

I say the source engine for power and features

6 of one and half a dozen of the other!
In other words, they both have their place...I don't think one is better than the other, they both have good things and bad things

It's like saying, which is better, a GM or a Chevie ?

I've generaly found that, it is the first game released with that specific engine that tends to make people think one engine is better than the other....it's just an illusion and the skills of the people doing the artwork for the game at the time trying to show off the engine as much as possible that people tend to say, hey that engine is way better, when in reality, they're all fairly similar....

there, now that should spark a debate

Interesting reply it should spark another saga in our little battles but since its getting kinda late (or early 4:59 AM) I should really try to get some sleep or ill crash at dinner time tomorrow

You can generally do whatever is needed to make the best game on earth with any modern engine... The differences between the engines are far outweighted by the creative abilities of the developers...
Another point is that the two engines you mentioned were released years apart, so the newer will have more fancy little features and stuff.

This question will probably never be answered until one company gets a monopoly and is the only one developing an engine. Course, without competition, their engine will be worse than what it should be...

Healthy competition breeds better products in the future.

Think of it as gaming evolution.

Current Unreal engine is generally thought to have better performance and optimization, while Source is believed to be more developer-friendly and crash-proof. After Source 2 was out (it's now the game engine of the updated HL2 and E1), a number of advanced graphical effects and support for 2048x2048 textures and stuff alike came at the price of a worse performance, Source no longer sounds like Performance to me.

This is no brainer, Source wins hands down. It is newer, has better graphics, more features, etc. etc.
Comparing engines with a big age difference is generally a bad idea.

I like UE3 better than other engines

A Corvette!

PS, It's Chevy. Or just Chevrolet.

yeah, noted, sorry to all the Chevy fans

But the unreal engine 2 and the source engine in half life 2 were being used at generally the same time weren't they? In a press release valve said they were using it back in 2001 to start modeling the faces and speech. And Half lie 2 and Unreal tournament 2004 were released 6 months apart it would seem kinda hard to create a whole new engine or start from the middle in that little of time.

Unreal Engine 2 was first used by UT2003, which was available in October 2002...

Source beats the crap out of Unreal 2/2.5, Unreal3 beats the crap out of Source. done

This was starting to be a good conversation
Anyway my friend also brought up the so called flaw that the Source engine has something about the sound and how the engine screws it up.

The sound in Source is fine in all the games I've played.
Maybe your friend was bringing up a flaw that his audio hardware & software are causing.

maybe his computer sucks....?
i played HL2 while running windows on my mac and every thing ran perfectly and the sound played great.

He has the same PC I do but he could just be naming off things to try to put the source engine down