Heh. Personally, I would recommend an Athlon 64, either the 2800 or the 3000. They are relatively cheap (for new processors), there is a good assortment of motherboards to be had with some wild features (the one I'm using is a Gigabyte K8-VNXP, which has 2 SATA channels, a IDE RAID array on the motherboard in addition to the standard IDE...so I can run up to 10 drives on the thing without adding any 3rd party controller cards). The only 64 bit chip in the non-Mac world that has any trouble with 32 bit code is the Intel Itanium...which uses a custom codeset, and requires and emulator to even run 32 bit apps and OS's. And the emulator eats at least 50% of your processor's ability. Vue and VuePro flies on an Athlon 64. P5 is faster loading. No issues in any of them related to the chip or chipset that I have discovered. And Win2kPro runs like a champ on it, as well... And the days of the Intel compatibility mythos are pretty much that; myth. Once that was true a few years ago, but since AMD went their own design route, instead of cloning Intel, that issue is no more. Now it boils down to a matter of whether an app has been coded to the accepted standard, or whether it has been slanted towards one of the tweaks of the code base. There are a few apps that do perform marginally better on Intel; those tend to be the very high end graphics programs, and the video editting suites...all of whom have been specifically optimized for Intel's SSE-SSE2 code additions. In all other arenas, AMD either holds its own, or is slightly better....and is a less expensive part, generally.