Athlon 64 vs Pentium 4

man wrote:

This has probably been talked about before here...

I'm building a new system...the goal is to avoid building a new system
for the longest possible time. It's come down to getting an AMD Athlon
64 3200+ with 1MB cache, or a Pentium 4 (Prescott) 3.0 GHZ with 1MB
cache.

In my research I've found that a prescott will beat the Athlon in most
benches.

That is not true. The Athlon 64 3200+ will beat the P4 3ghz Prescott
in most benchmarks.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2065&p=1

The prescott also seems attractive because it can be
overclocked to 4 GHZ (!).

Overclocking is not recommended if you want a stable system. Overclocking
also tends to reduce the life of the processor, and might require expensive
water cooling to overclock by large margin.



But is the future of operating systems 64-bit?

Yes.

Or is it going to be
years before windows will be 64 bit in the mainstream?

Years? It will probably be released in early to mid 2005.
64 bit Linux is available now.



So in other words, is 64-bit silly, and should I just go for the
speed?

The Athlon 64 has the speed in both 32 bit and 64 bit.