Craig/Hopkinj,
The 64 bit capability for an AMD64 processor is only a secondary tangential benefit. As I stated in my posts, the AMD line offers a price to performance ratio which cannot be beat by Intel. The REAL benefit why AMD64 trounces an Intel is that they include the North Brigde chipset on the CPU die itself. This is exactly why an AMD running at ~2Ghz can outperform an Intel ~3Ghz cpu in most real world tests. Besides, the actual benefits of a 64-bit platform are few and far in between in the consumer arena, but they are getting better. For example, Farcry has extra graphics in their 64-bit version which are not available in the 32-bit binary (last I checked).
I understand Roger's reluctance for AMD, but I've been using them for about 8 years now without any problems what so ever. Me, I still play War3 DoTA
PS-But don't get me started on Opteron vs Xeon...its like comparing Axioms to Bose
