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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 2072129" data-attributes="member: 149">As far as 64 bit goes, this is really only important if you need to use large (greater than 4gb ram). Other than that it's fairly meaningless. Yes the latest Intel Chips have 64 bit extentions, but from current reviews apparently mostly take a performance hit from running in 64 bit mode as opposed to the Athalon 64/Opteron chips which see a significant benefit from runing in a 64 bit enviroment. Though that is somewhat more complicated than just the operating system. A lot of device drivers are not available in 64bit versions yet, for example. Though I'm not sure exactly how that interacts at least with the AMD chips in terms of performance.Frankly you will get nightmare stories about any computer manufacture or building them on your own. All it takes is one idiot (on either side) and/or missunderstanding + non obvious problem to produce a nightmare. In my experience though, if you are half way competent you are unlikely to get much in the way of tech support for consumer level products (though Apple is Top Rated for this and the new Mac Mini IS only $500) that you couldn't have figured out faster on your own. Don't bother worring about a computer lasting for more than 3 years. The hard cold fact is that by that time technology has advanced enough that what ever you have is obsolecent and in 5 years it's obsolete. No amount of money you can spend will change that. The power of computers doubles roughly every 18 mo and the difference in power between the top end systems and the low end systems is roughly that. So in 18 months the low end systems are as powerful as your 18 mo old top end system. In 3 years the low end systems are twice as powerful and in 5 years they are 4 TIMES as powerful. If performance is your goal, the AMD Althalon FX Chips are head and shoulders above Intel's offerings for everything except video encoding and the new FX-57 due to be shipping in 2-3 weeks may beat them even there (it adds the SSE3 instructions that have helped the Intel chips). Of course you are talking about $1000 chip, but the Intel P4EE chips are similarly priced and get left behind. The AMD chips also have the highly regarded Nforce4 based motherboards with the SLI slots for use with Nvidia cards (no word yet on the AIT solution). These are clearly among the cream of the crop in MBs currently and for architectural reasons are superior to anything available for Intel Chips. Mostly the fact that they have a separate direct processor to memory connection, where as the intel chips are routed through the FSB through which all the other data has to pass as well. This means that the AMD chips can benefit from the verly low latency memory that is available. BTW the AMD chips can not use the newer DDR-2 memory, but since the performance of DDR-2 is actually lower than DDR at the same clock speeds (and doesn't actually go faster either) this is not exactly a disadvantage. What ever a computer sales person tries to tell you. What ever you get AVOID AT ALL COSTS systems with video cards built into the motherboard.</blockquote>

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