PCStats thought it would be interesting to see how overclocking is affected on the WindowsXP x64 Edition platform by illustrating both 32-bit and 64-bit benchmarks for an AMD Athlon64 4000+ based system. Would the test platform be stable enough to overclock successfully? Would WindowsXP x64 Edition require a more stable processor than its 32-bit counterpart does?

To test out this idea, we installed the trial version of Microsoft WindowsXP x64 Edition (180 day free trial) on an AMD Athlon64 rig and ran some 32-bit benchmarks as well as a few new 64-bit benchmarks which were supplied by AMD for the original release of 64-bit CPUs last year. Some of the results are as expected, but as you'll soon see, some of the results are quite unexpected!