athlon64 3400 is a step above the a 3.2GHz p4 really.. (though I'm sure someone will argue with that) and if you go with something a bit slower on the Athlon64 line the price drops rather quickly, an Athlon64 3200+ is $282, and Athlon64 3000+ is $216 etc for not a huge difference in performance, but a tidy savings in the wallet...
Of course, you can find benchmarks saying a lot of things.. But most reviews show the 3400+ winning in gaming categories, where as the P4 winning in mpeg creation etc...
Then there's also the fact that Athlon64's are 64bit ready, they do have NX which will be a big thing when WinXP SP2 enables it, causing an end to buffer overflow virus's(although I seem to not suffer from these...)
Personally, I'd never spend more than $250 on a cpu unless I had money to burn.
Of course, you can find benchmarks saying a lot of things.. But most reviews show the 3400+ winning in gaming categories, where as the P4 winning in mpeg creation etc...
Then there's also the fact that Athlon64's are 64bit ready, they do have NX which will be a big thing when WinXP SP2 enables it, causing an end to buffer overflow virus's(although I seem to not suffer from these...)
Personally, I'd never spend more than $250 on a cpu unless I had money to burn.
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