I would still wait for the 939 boards (Nforce 3), I heard they will be the
higher end socket board and will be around for a long time, and it will be
more stable to as well.
"Lachoneus" wrote in message
...
It's commonly said that in 32 bit mode am AMD64 is faster than any
Intel Pentium chip. How accurate is that statement ?

About as accurate as any blanket statement that X is faster than Y. It
depends on the benchmark. Athlon 64s tend to be faster than similarly
priced P4s in games and office applications, whereas P4s still rule the
content encoding and synthetic memory bandwidth benchmarks.

Athlon 64s are, however, generally faster than similarly clocked Athlon
XPs--thanks largely to their integrated memory controllers (and, to an
extent in certain benchmarks, their SSE2 support). This is why, in my
opinion, it doesn't make sense to buy a new Athlon XP system anymore, when
an Athlon 64 2800+ can be had for less than $150 and will outperform even
a $200+ Athlon XP 3200+.

FWIW I've been using 64bit servers for almost 10 years, and know the
tradeoffs of 32bit and 64bit. I want to buy in the price-performance
"sweet spot". I know anything that I buy today will seem obosete 3
months later. That's life.

My suggestion is the S754 Athlon 64 3000+ (about $175 currently). The
single-channel memory interface looks a lot slower in synthetic memory
bandwidth tests, but real-world benchmarks don't seem to show a whole lot
of difference. Certainly not enough to justify the high price of S939
CPUs (the cheapest of which is still over $400).

Of course, in three months this will probably change, leaving me to regret
the S754 CPU I just bought. But, as you say, that's life.