Help me sort out the AMD Athlon 64 CPU models

I'm thinking of building a new high-end system (not bleading edge, no
overclocking). The primary justification is Photoshop CS. Pricewatch
shows 11 different Athlon64 models ($126-$739) differing in clock
speed, cache size, and bus speed. I believe the FX models are now
"history" so we are talking about a choice of 8 models.

It's commonly said that in 32 bit mode am AMD64 is faster than any
Intel Pentium chip. How accurate is that statement ?

I'll hand-wave and guess that as a single-user system running a
compute-intensive single process that crunches multi-MB chunks of data
in memory in a linear fashion, bus speed and clock trump cache
size. I'm not sure what CPU models that would indicate.

A few weeks ago I heard that AMD was about to announce new models
and/or prices. Has that happened yet. I'd just as soon wait for that.

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.

Comments ?

Thanks

--
Al Dykes
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adykes at p a n i x . c o m