Hmmm... Was that 'Win64' or 'XP-64'? There -is- a version of Server 2003, I believe, that -has- been heavily optimized for the Itanium...and if they used =that= for benchmarking a 64 bit AMD chip, they are complete fools. Not only is X86-64 not compatible with SSE-2, you have to run an emulator with the Itanium to even get =any= X86 code to execute; an SSE-2 optimized OS would probably not even boot on a Hammer chip, unless there was a secondary executable for X86 32 bit. XP-64 is a new version of WinXP that is in beta at the moment, and is =supposed= to be built around full support for X86-64 in native mode...as well as an on the fly interpreter (not emulator) to allow X86-32 to also run natively. And Max -couldn't be installed on the Itanium optimized Server 2003; it may have the SSE2 extensions in the rendering pipeline, but it is still good old X86-32 code. I think I'll see if I can find that article; something just ain't right there... I don't suppose that 3D World is a Ziff-Davis publication, by any chance....? I don't have a copy handy...