Badge, the main reason for your noticeable performance increase is not your Athlon 64. Rather, it is your upgrade from a 9700 Pro to an x800 Pro. It also accounts for your respectable Aquamark score primarily. Sure, the A64 is a faster chip than an AXP-M @ 2.6 Ghz, but as Grov wisely pointed out, a mobile barton @ 2.6 is far from slow.
Looking at his current system, I'd say he probably gets 3D Marks around roughly 24-25k. With an Athlon 64 upgrade, he'll probably hit around 28-29k. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see all that money worth such a small upgrade (in his case, that is). Then again, the argument can be made that 3D Mark is no longer the best determinant of actual performance. To be fair, I admit that he'll probably see an additional 20-30 fps in some higher-end games, such as Far Cry, D3, and HL2. Yet this still is not enough to justify an upgrade to the K8 core in his situation. I'd probably be a little more enthusiastic if he had a 9700 Pro or equivalent, but the fact the currently possesses a high-end card means that his upgrade will mean little even in games.
His best bet is to wait for Nforce 4, obviously because PCIe is the future. If he wishes to keep his current card, however, he still needs to wait on the newer Athlon 64 chips. I say this because they are believed to remedy some of the current issues plagued by the Winchester processors. This does not mean that Winchesters are a terrible buy, but the fact of the matter is that there is belief that the revision E chips will include an enhanced memory controller, better thermal management (i.e. the chips won't get so hot as you increase speed), and possibly SSE3. So it is in his best interests to just sit tight when other alternatives are around the corner.
deception``
