The AMD Athlon64 and AthlonFX line of processors has been on the market long enough to become a standard, rather than the 'newest thing.' The excellent performance offered by these chips (running 32-bit benchmarks) has been well documented. PCI-Express support is coming soon care of the Nvidia nForce 4, and the next wave of chipsets, due around Christmas should result in a whole lot more 64-bit capable desktops popping around the world.