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I've used XP64 for a while now and I have yet to really see any performance benefits. I run it on 2 systems, one is a Athlon 64 3400 and the other an Athlon X2 4400.
I've found that games such as HL2, even in 64bit mode, don't run any better. Infact on XP64 I'd say it runs marginally worse. I seem to get just a little bit more stuttering than on normal XP. I've also had problems with Farcry in that It crashes out all the time even though I've patched to the 64bit version and added the 64bit extra content. Then there are still the issues of finding a decent firewall/AV app that will run on XP64 as well as other apps that will not run, and trying to find 64bit device drivers can be a bit of a nightmare at times.
Overall I noticed a much better performance gain from going dual core than going XP64. Even if a game doesn't support dual core I can still set all processes to run off 1 core leaving the second core for dedicated gaming. And there are some games that are now optimised for dual core such as Quake 4 with the relevant patch, that runs so much better on my dual core system.
I believe that 64bit will become more widely supported with the release of Vista but it will not be this that drives performance forward, it will be future multicore CPU's, it's only a matter of time before we start getting 3+ core CPU's and when this happens it will give much more performance benefits than a 64bit OS.
I've found that games such as HL2, even in 64bit mode, don't run any better. Infact on XP64 I'd say it runs marginally worse. I seem to get just a little bit more stuttering than on normal XP. I've also had problems with Farcry in that It crashes out all the time even though I've patched to the 64bit version and added the 64bit extra content. Then there are still the issues of finding a decent firewall/AV app that will run on XP64 as well as other apps that will not run, and trying to find 64bit device drivers can be a bit of a nightmare at times.
Overall I noticed a much better performance gain from going dual core than going XP64. Even if a game doesn't support dual core I can still set all processes to run off 1 core leaving the second core for dedicated gaming. And there are some games that are now optimised for dual core such as Quake 4 with the relevant patch, that runs so much better on my dual core system.
I believe that 64bit will become more widely supported with the release of Vista but it will not be this that drives performance forward, it will be future multicore CPU's, it's only a matter of time before we start getting 3+ core CPU's and when this happens it will give much more performance benefits than a 64bit OS.
My iRiver works perfectly well. 
Not a single driver needed.
