Before I start, I want to state that I haven't bought any serious computer hardware since late 1999/early 2000. In fact, other than a replacement cd-writer a few years ago, and a 99 dollar video card, I've bought none.

A few months back, I decided to make a jump to the OSX world, and then a few weeks later I was thanking fate that I didn't buy a new mac box and only lost a few hundred dollars on a soon to be obsolete piece of beautifully sculpted plastic.

Obviously that didn't work out as expected.

Since that was my only major hardware purchase since early 2000, and even that was better than my last computer, I figured another move had to be made, but hopefully one that was less questionable.

Another side note... I did have more modern and faster computers, but they were the property of my employer. I had moved to the point where I was using them exclusively, and something about keeping all of my personal data on a computer which wasn't mine made me slightly uneasy.

So after a little shopping, I picked out a nice HP with an Athlon 64 3400+ processor. Got it home, booted it up, and only one word came to mind: Wow.

One of my work computers was a Pentium 4 3.0ghz. It wasn't a speed demon by any stretch, but it was pretty quick. It was also concorde-esque loud. The HP, on the other hand, was whisper quiet when I turned it on. Then, shock of shocks, it got even quieter once it started booting.

I'll say it again, it's dead quiet. Barely a whisper coming from it. If it weren't the fact that the power switch glows blue when it's on, I wouldn't know it was on.

It came preloaded with XP, but that's... not acceptable. I had planned to dual boot between XP/64 and Suse 9.3 (64). But since I had read tons and tons and tons of bad reviews of XP64 (at best, cautious reviews) I scrapped that bit. I probably wouldn't have scrapped it, until I found out that virus scanning didn't work in XP/64, and XP without a virus scanner is just asking for trouble.

So I installed Suse 9.3 64. Standard Suse installation, which is to say, no brainer. Let it go out and fetch the latest NVIDIA drivers and whatnot, and it was perfectly happy.

So, like, how's it work?

In a word or two: Pretty good.

Everyone's seen the benchmarks, and everybody knows the Athlon 64 has it all over the P4. Everyone knows you don't buy a P4 to game. Fine.

But that really doesn't do it justice. The processor is fantstic for graphics and gaming. And since UT2004 has a 64bit edition, that's what I tried first. There's not a huge improvement in framerates, which is what everyone states. I was able to crank up the detail without any dropoff tho, which was nice. So to summarize that last bit, my Athlon 64/3400, which really runs at 2.2ghz, with a NV5200 graphics card utterly destroyed my P4 3.0ghz with a NV5500 video card. Utterly. Destroyed.

Suse came with a mixed assortment of 32 and 64bit software. All of the major libraries are available in both. Firefox and Konqueror are available in 32bit only (as far as I know at any rate) so they'll work with the 32bit plugins (Damn you Flash, you're holding me back). Tired old Mozilla comes in both 32bit and 64bit versions, and it does feel faster in it's 64bit incarnation.

Startup is also noticably faster, and finally Suse is letting the network do it's DHCP stuff in the background while the system boots up. Those few seconds really do add up.

So far, so good.