athlon 64 or athlon xp

[nabeels]

Hey everyone,

Is there any advantage to having 64 bit, aside from the obvious. Is there wide support for it and is there a large noticeable performance gain? I'm on about a $1500 budget, so I can fit one in, if its worth it.

Or should I just stick with the Barton Athlon XP?

Thanks
Nabeel

 

[MrCodeDude]

If your budget can take it, go A64. There is a noticable performance difference between the A64's and the Athlon XP's, even if 64 bit isn't fully supported.

 

[darkswordsman17]

First of all, there is very little support for it so far. There is no official (other than maybe a super expensive server version) 64 bit Windows, and so there is very little software that is 64 bit (aside from servers).

Win64 is supposed to be out this fall, but hey, don't be too optimistic.

Athlon 64 does however offer a better architecture. It is more even with the P4. It will downright beat the P4 in gaming, but will likewise get handed its @$$ in encoding. But the XP doesn't come near as close as the Athlon 64.

Also, A64 will offer more future-proofing, as Socket A has pretty much maxed itself out.

Just go A64 since you've got the money to.

 

[nabeels]

Alright, thanks guys.

And I take it there's no issues in terms of backwards compatability with 32bit and maybe the legacy 16bit apps?

And do I need XP Pro over Home to get the full advantage?

 

[SickBeast]

No and no. 🙂

 

[FunkierThanU]

Definitely go for the AMD 64.

As far as no 64 bit support, not in Windows yet but several flavors of Linux do. I've got a dual boot w/ XP and Mandrake 10.0 that runs like a champ. The only real trick is to load XP first.

My AMD 64 3200 + runs serious circles around my Athlon XP 2800+ box. No compatibility issues that I've seen. btw, I'm a total noob w/ Linux... if I can, you can too!