Actually Vee_ess, I've never owned a Shuttle. You may be thinking of Accurate Image. He had a kick-ass shuttle a couple years back. But I do agree with you. Shuttles perform just as good as full-sized systems.

As far as the rest of this thread goes... PCI express is the future. However, right now it does not offer any performance increase what so ever. The current generations of video cards do not, and I repeat, do not take advantage of the capabilities of PCI express. Do a Google search for PCI-express video card reviews and you'll see. So buying an ATI X800 or nVidia 6800 PCI-E video card "right now" would be a waste of money. However, in the near future, it's going to be a different story because it's going to take some time for card mfgs to catch up. The current cards are just something they released because they wanted to have something out as soon as possible.

Regarding whether or not you need 64-bit applications or operating systems to take advantage of the AMD64 chip is absolute nonsense. I have two systems. A AMD64 3400+ and an AMD XP 3200+. Both have similar clock speeds and the AMD64 kicks the 3200's butt. 1MB cache makes a HUGE difference. Especially in benchmarking, I.E performance. The AMD64 chips weren't designed only for 64-bit apps, it was designed to perform well in both 32 and 64.