That's not why the 64s are faster. You have all been led into the Intel trap of lies which has convinced you that clock speed is the only thing that determines the speed of a processor. The 64s are faster because they are 64-bit. My Athlon XP 2600+ runs at 2.31 ghz, yet is far inferior to my friend's Athlon 6400 3200+, which runs at 2.0 ghz. This is because of a few things. First , the 64s are 64 bit, which means they can handle more operations at a time. Second, the Athlon 64 series all (except for the lower end Athlon 64 3200s) run on either a socket-754 or a socket 939 motherboard, as opposed to the socket A motherboard which my Athlon XP uses. The 754s and 939s have more pins (754 and 939, respectively), which allows for greater bandwidth to the motherboard. There are a number of other features which make some cpus faster than others, but I won't go into the details. CDI, I recommend looking at an ABS machine, you can get a good gaming rig of them cheap, and they are very high quality and have extremely reputable customer service.