I haven't had the chance to try a computer system running the AMD Athlon 64 but when comparing the P4 Northwood to an Athlon XP I found Intel is much better and faster. I compared a system with an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ to a system with an Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz Northwood with an 800mhz FSB and HT Tech and found that the P4 was more than twice as fast as the Athlon when benchmarking with AquaMark3. The first system scored a 8,485 while the Intel scored a 16,225. I believe this to be the faster FSB, HT Tech, Dual Channel RAM, and a few other things not CPU related. Unfortunately his computer came equiped with an eVGA nVidia GeForce FX 5200 with 128MB RAM while the Intel system has an eVGA nVidia GeForce FX 5700 LE with 256MB RAM. Although the faster system has a better video card, I beg to challenge the fact that a video card swap would really give the AMD the upper hand. Anyways, I think I'll stick with Intel and hopefully they will come up with a 64-bit idea that's more stable than AMD and doesn't use performance ratings as I think they are a sorry idea and make AMD look like they are having trouble keeping up in the race.