Basically im upgrading and im looking to spend $300 - $340 (AUS). These are the two cpu's that i'm left with. Im not very familiar with 64-bit (i.e wot it does) and all i can really see is that the p4 is 3.2gig and the athlon64 is 2gig. I will

Could someone please help me out?

Hi Slasher.

The biggest problem that I see with 64-bit processors is that you will have very little support for them currently. There are really no main stream applications that are 64-bit. I am not sure if Windows has their 64-bit OS available yet (I don't think they do). I know that the newer linux kernels can be built to take advantage of the 64-bit chips, but I just don't think that you will get any realized speed increase out of it right now (except maybe for heavy compilations, etc.)

64-bit is a very cool thing and in the future I think we will see real speed improvements out of it. But, in order to get these improvements, the entire architecture of the PC is going to need to be improved. Whether or not your processor can compute 64-bit streams or not is unimportant once it pushes it back onto the system bus or to a hard drive, or to a video card or to memory. These are the real bottlenecks of a system.

I usually don't buy bleeding edge processors. I go back a few steps to have more money to buy more and faster memory (I never want my system to page), high-end graphics card (depending upon your application) and higher speed hard drives (you do need to go to the hard drive at times ).

I guess the biggest question is what is your application and your O/S?