Yeah, the processor is extreemly important. I took a AMD 2400+ that I overclocked and scored well over 1000 points lower then I did with a 3000+. Now that's w/o any overclcok on the 3000+. It seems that the L1 and L2 cache size have a lot to do with the overall score.

As for AMD/P4, I have an AMD in my desktop and a P4 in my laptop. Even though I have a hyperthreading P4 3.06 533fsb in my laptop, my desktop has a AMD 3000+ 333fsb and it seems faster. I think the reason it seems faster is because of the fact I have 1gig of PC2700 Ram, but I have 512 Mb of PC 2100 in my laptop.

Now with it just scoring a few hundred higher, there really isn't that much difference in the overall performance of the card. I can score 100 points higher by just have 1-2 more fps in the game tests. Now if the FX 5900 is only pushing 5-6 more fps per game test, then that small margin of overall performance doesn't appeal to me especially when you're pushing the clock speeds so high you have to put liquid nitorgen to cool it, I'll stick to the ATI card.

I just found out that if you push the FX 5900 too high (even none or just a little) some ppl seem to be having a "Flickering" problem in 2d. Where as the ATI card has an overall better picture quality while running games and you don't have to worry about the flickering. But, with ATI, you have to worry about their drivers which aren't as good as Nvidia's drivers.

So I guess you have pluses and minuses which everway you go, but I personally recommend ATI because they took the high speed market first with the 9700.