To amd64 or not to amd64?

[alecn2002]

Well, probably this question was discussed here many times, but the last thread about "transiting from i386 to amd64" dated year 2004, so it's very posible things change since that time...

So,

I've just upgraded my home comp from AMD Sempron to Athlon64. Only CPU upgrade, nothing else.

I've booted my old good i386-arched FreeBSD 6.1 and it looks like it works fine.
The question is: will I have any benefits if I'll move to amd64 system, or it's safer and better to stay with i386 arch?

About 50% of time my children use it to watch movies (DVD, DivX, MPEG-4).
>From the rest I use it for working at home (RadRails, KDevelop, a lot of C/C++ compilation), and my wife use it to access Internet and use OpenOffice.

Problem-free operation and stability have precedense for me over system speed.

Technical details:
M/B: ASUS K8N, with on-board PATA/SATA, audio, 10/100/1000 Ethernet
Processor: AMD Athlon64 3000+ 2GHz (Was: AMD Sempron 2800+ 1.8 GHz)
RAM: 1 * 512 Mb PC-400
HDD: 80 Gb SATA-150 (Seagate <someth...>)
Video: NVidia GeForce 4 FX 5800 128 Mb AGP 8x

System:
FreeBSD  6.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE #0: Sat Sep 23 00:12:24 MSD 2006     root@:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/ALECN61  i386
XFree86-4.5 + nvidia-driver-1.0.8774
KDE 3.5.4

One more detail: I do need linuxlator, b/c I use RadRails a lot and it runs in Linux mode only. AFAIK there is no 64-bit linuxlator exist and amd64 system use 32-bit linuxlator, is it efficient and reliable enough?

Even more detail: AFAIK there is no amd64 NVidia driver for direct rendering available, is it correct?



And one side question: will I benefit if I move to amd64 system and install gcc-4.1, over current gcc-3.4.4 that came with system?
And the same - if I'll stay in i386 mode but upgrade to gcc-4.1?
I mean here both compilation speed and efficiency of generated code.



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With best regards,
Alexander Novitsky