During last week I used Athlon64 X2 3800+ to make some OpenEmbedded bug fixing. Building on such machine is pleasure — you start build, talk a bit on IRC and build is finished. After using accounts on that kind of machines I do not even try to run builds on my AthlonXP machines (1700+ and 2200+). Probably it is a moment when I could consider switch to AMD64 platform but there is a usual problem.
Cheapest way is something low budget like Sempron64 2500+ on socket 754 (cheapest amd64 platform) with VIA based mainboard (don’t want to trace does nForce boards work OK under Linux). Or I can choose cheapest Athlon64 on socket 939 — this will allow me to switch to more powerfull CPU in future. Ofcourse there are Semprons64/s939 but only OEM with mATX boards by Gigabyte (I do not like mainboards from that company).
Local shop has also Athlons for AM2 socket so maybe switching to this family will be best… but this require new gfx card as I have only AGP ones (Matrox G400 and GeForce MX440) or buying mainboard with so called GeForce 6100 onboard gfx. Also new memory — DDR2 instead of DDR which I have already in box.
It can be be hard to decide which way to choose but currently I rather will only think about it — have other things to buy, need to think about our wedding in next year etc.