Re. the AMD's - I'm not suprised at all. On most benchmarking and 3rd-party hardware news sites, the benchmarks on the Athlons usually beat the crap out much faster P4 chips, especially in the video-intensive performance departments. Heck, it's been this way since the old AMD K6/2 chips came out. Also, P4's have a horrendous latency problem (though a lot of it should have cleared up after Intel added DDR memory ability to their mobo chipsets... Rambus amplified the latency troubles big-time, and Rambus was all you could get w/ a P4 for the first year or so.) HTH to explain a little as to why the numbers shape up like they do... /P