Athlon 64

[zomart]

Hey-
I'm planning on buying parts for a new system soon and was wondering about the upcoming release of the amd athlon 64 (and 64 bit computing in general). At first i was set on buying an athlon xp (probably 2700+), but now i'm debating whether or not i want to hold out for the 64 bit parts. Will the performance even be worth waiting for? Will there be a chipset and mobo available soon along with the processor (preferably asus with nvidia)? Will windows 64 (win xp 64) be out yet? Or should I just go for the athlon xp with a7n8x deluxe now? I know there's not a definite answer to this question, but i'm trying to find as many opinions as possible before i make a large purchase like this. Any thoughts would be appreciated... thanks!

 

[Mephistopheles]

Actually, 64-bit technology is not officially due until September. That means end-of-the year availability, at the earliest. It depends on your needs, then: how soon do you need your new system? How fast do you want your system to be? What are you going to use on it? Do you want lots of upgradeability? The more information you give us, the better.

As to the performance gain, it should be faster than any previous Barton, but it´s very hard to tell at this point. I would be willing to guess that it won´t be earthshattering, though, based mainly on the fact that the damned thing is already several months too late. Might be possible still, that with good software support, it´ll be a trump card... Wouldn´t bet on it. Software support looks thin, at the moment. Besides, with this large of a time interval, lots of other things will come to the market. Intel´s own Canterwood (a new high-performance chipset), which is due in a month or so, will then be running Prescotts, the newest processors from Intel with high specs (800Mhz FSB, HT-enhanced, architecture revised, etc). So by then, you can bet that there´ll be plenty of configurations that´ll rock all systems that are now on the market. That´s the name of the game, new technologies are always around the corner...

 

[HardWareBoss]

The question to the question is how much money do you want to spend? Also how long do you want to wait before you upgrade. 2 months for Intel's new chip or Dec for AMD?