FreeBSD Installation Suggestion

[Christopher Key]

Hello,

I'm about to install FreeBSD for the first time on a new machine and 
have a few questions:

1) The motherboard is an Intel DQ964GF, which uses the ICH8 chipset.  Is 
it better to use this in IDE or AHCI mode?  (The system will be booting 
from a S-ATA disk)

2) Are there any good documents discussing the relative merits of using 
i386 / amd64?

3) Does anyone have any good suggestions on how to perform the 
installation.  The machine has no floppy or CD-ROM drive, and it's not 
really convenient to temporarily add them as I may well end up going 
through the install procedure several times.  The options seem to be 
either a USB flash drive (any thoughts on how to get a UFS file system 
and FreeBSD MBR on there using only WinXP), or via the network.

Any advice much appreciated,

Chris