alright, let me qualify my above statements.
running windows xp, vs a p4 3ghz HT machine (both with dual channel ram, 2 x 256mb strips, western digital sata raptors and an ati 9800 pro) there is no difference in anything I use on a day to day basis.
I really havent had much chance to play with the athlon machine, I am intrigued by the new techology, and purchased the system because of the benchmarks being so much nicer then the p4's.
Unfortunately, I dont do video rendering, massive db accessing and other such things that they use for bench marking, so while the cpu does bench higher, from a user standpoint, it doesnt run windows xp any faster
perhaps if you ran linux, you may see a difference. I know that the older amd's running linux were smokin machines.
these amd's are also not cheap....