[Bring the Noise]

Offie - Wait until after Christmas and catch a good sale price on a nforce3/3500 combo or wait until around march and get a nforce4/3800 combo.

By March the 3800+'s should be at 90nm and reduced in price and the nforce4 board will be at a good price point as well.

Now Aedan, you have to remember their are more registers within the Opteron that in 32bit mode are currently not used.
In 32bit the K8 has 8 GPRs (General Purpose Registers), 8 FPRs (Floating-Point Registers), and 8 SIMDs (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) registers.
In 64bit it doubles the available number of GPRs and SIMD registers to 16, up from 8 each. Leaving the FPU to be handled by SSE2 registers.

Now for FPU's add on FPU's have been pushing past 64bit for a while.
3D Now (introduced on the K6-2's) was an 80bit FPU, SSE was 64bit, and SSE2 is 128bit...

What I'm wondering is, why AMD didn't tweak 3D Now, it was 80bit and faster then SSE (even though it worked throught the x87/MMX registers). 3D Now Pro was offered on the K7's and doubled the 80bit FPU register's (ontop of the cpu's on high end FPU).

Then again it probably wasn't hard for AMD to re-work the 3D Now registers into handling SSE instructions.