Hi Guys, I

From what I have heard Win XP 64-BIT is due first Q of 2005, but on that note, does anyone have info on the 64BIT Intel's, I am looking at the 64BIT AMD's and just wondering if Intel's are any better or are they strictly server chips only?

As an avowed intel a really excited user i find it hard but i have to tell you this.. If you are going to buy anything meant to last for a while right now....You need to drop the intel and get AMD ... (Reasons being...)Intels Prescott cpu is a flame thrower.. which is proving even more difficult to ramp up to the fabled 4ghz (was announced to be delayed until next year last week)Intels New Chipset 915/925 shows no current performance advantages to the last good chipset they had...865pe/875.Intels 64 bit architecture that you were referring to has yet to prove itself compatibiliy wise with windows 64 bit edition.All these claims above can be verified from reviews found on THG and AnandtechTrust me .. im using and have used intels processors 95% of my pc affilated years so when they screw up they really must have done something real bad. Waited 6 months for the prescott CPU only to find out that the 1 meg cache had no help (was worse performing in some areas) and that the temps were out of this world. I dont like having more than 3-4 80mm fans running in my case thank you.As a result .. until Intel realizes the diamond in the rough thats called the Pentium M and develop it into a desktop version or find a decent replacemtn to the present prescott core my next PC is going to be "AMD inside"suggested replacementMobo=MSI K8N Neo2 PlatinumCPU=AMD Athlon 3500 Newcastle core Socket 939..If you must go intel ..either wait for 3.8 mhz prescott (you can get the mobo you wanted with that) and hopefully the performance of the chipsets would be better. (they suck hard now)or Get a 3.2 or 3.4 Northwood (you will need a 875 chipset board with that Asus P4C800. You wont be using PCIe with this chipset/mobo ... in any case .. PCIe hasnt developed itself yet enough to be taken advantage of..my 2 cents

Yeah I did plan to go for AMD, I had a friend who built a budget system and put a 2400+, for only running at 2GHZ, it is very nice, so I can just image a 64bit AMD.

There's little doubt that the Athlon 64 is the way to go right now. & the good part is that the 939 pin core will be sticking around for a bit which will allow for future processor upgrades on that platform. The Athlon 64 has also proven itself to me a gaming monster outpacing Intel's best by a good margin in most gaming tests. The Intel's tho are still somewhat better @ pure number crunching, video editiong,& audio compression. Well atleast in 32bit Windows anyway. In 64bit the Athlon seems to improve quite a bit & gives Intel an even greater challenge.

Unless you're going to be overclocking your FSB to some insane speed, drop the PC4200 memory and get some quality PC3200. Those PC4200 sticks run at some pretty crap timings. The newer Corsair 3200XL can overclock to PC4000+ speeds with the same timings of the 4200.

Uhhh, thanks for al the advice guys. Now for the PC4200 memory: I have an Asus P5AD2 Premium mobo with the FSB @ 800 Mhz and the FSB of the processor will also be running @ 800 Mhz, but the manual of the mobo says that the mobo has a DDR2 memory @ 533 Mhz, and I read that these corsair modules are specially for these new motherboards supporting DDR2 533 Mhz memories. This is how I thought it would run at it

Ah, DDR2. Well, if you're going down that road you're going to be stuck with using loose timing on your RAM until such time as they produce tighter timings on the RAM.The FSB of your CPU will run at 800Mhz, but its quad pumped, so it really only runs at a true 200Mhz.