I am going to be building a socket 939 system to get PCI-X and SATA, etc. I have an athlon XP 3200+ right now. Until I can afford a faster processor, I am looking at the athlon 64 3200+. Is the a64 faster than the XP at rendering/encoding movies? what about games? do the socket 939 a64's overclock well? I plan to do some light overclocking. I will also probably run windows 64-bit edition. Thanks

The major difference between the A64 & all CPUs before it (including all Intel CPUs) is the fact that the memory controller is built into the CPU, not the motherboard. Rather than trying to expalin it myself, have a look at this:

http://www.spodesabode.com/content/article/a64chipsets

Bottomline is the A64 architecture is superior to the AXP...don't let the AXP 3200+ vs A64 3200+ fool you into thinking they're evenly matched. Check this interactive CPU comparison chart:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=269&chart=63&model2=247