Daytona 500; speed.
m_gerbik, "kittens eating pop rocks candy?" Man I do hope you didn't try that in your homicidal childhood. Hehe, kinda sounds funny when you picture it in your mind, but its cruel if you do it.
Now with all these peeps that have G5 PowerMacs, Opterons, and Athlon 64-FX-51s what exactly are you doing with your machines that you needed/want them for????
Games not included because if you bought your new system to get the highest frame rates in Quake, Doom, or Unreal Tourny, then your the mass fools that the computing industry loves, and I mean that lovingly, not as an insult. The choice of "fool" was that performance would be better for games if you already have a 1Ghz 32-bit cpu if you max out your ram and get the best video card and faster HDD performance.
64-bit processors promise better efficiency in executing code for office applications and mainly for number crunching like in biotech apps and in database intranet/internet/datamining/data-storage and recall apps. All the big corps use it for things like this in majority.
Even the latest Photoshop results on all cpus liked more RAM than cpu speed and generation. Video editing I'm not sure on. Home user use probably not, but for what that producer (of the film Twin Peaks and the original Dune) is using it for in online movie delivery and editing then I'm sure that is pretty cpu intensive.
I want to run a web-server, a forum along with stats site to deliver those stats to cellphone users worldwide along with my office app needs. When I get a DV camcorder then it'll pay for itself - the PowerMac G5 I mean.
Now what about you, do you need a 2.6Ghz machine? I know we all want one, but how much will it increase or current usuage on our existing machines, especially given the advances in OS X or the lack of in XP Pro SP1a and the upcoming SP2.