Two things upfront:
1) Sorry for the long, rather rambling post...
2) Intel and AMD Fanboys: Beat it. Get lost. Don't wanna hear from 'ya. This ain't AMD vs. Intel. This is about SPEED & STABILITY. Also don't care about the FX-51 chip users. The fan-boys made all of the user "reviews" at newegg 100% useless. I hate how someone who didn't buy something can RATE IT! That's BS! Opps...back on topic:
OK, now that a good 64-Bit OS and plenty of apps are available, I'm starting to reconsider the whole A-64 thing. I like the the P4C's, but 64-bit power may just be nice. Or not.
Ok, now for the questions:
1. What mobo/chipset are you using? Any "issues"? I've heard some A64 boards have problems with more than one stick of memory is installed.
(I'm very cautious about any VIA chipset mobo's...I've had VERY bad luck with both Athlon & P4's with VIA chipset mobos. But they're ALOT cheaper than the nForce 3's).
2. How's the performance in the real world? Especially compared to P4C's of equalivent speeds (ONLY if you've used both!) Especially interested in real-world DivX encoding & DVD rip/copy (ie, DVDShrink) performance. My 2.4C does a 1HR video in about an hour with DivX 5.1.1 under MPEG Mediator (920K/s, 128K/s Lame MP3).
I hate benchmarks; they never truely show what a system can do. Case in point: P4's w/Hyperthreading. May not get done any faster with something, but you can do something CPU intensive and still USE the system. I know: I have a P4C. DuvX encoding while playing UT2K3, w/o slowdown? Check.
Hmm...think that about covers it...
Back to mobo shopping...but only from the big-name company's (Abit, Gigabyte, Asus...maybe AOpen-Anandtech had good things to say about the AK-86-L)...