A friend of mine who's recently switched from Debain Etch to FreeBSD (perhaps due to nagging on my part that he wasn't using a real Unix system ) is using the i386 version even though he's capable of running AMD64 because of the usual official Nvidia drivers only supporting the former.

Problem is, because he's got 6 gigs of RAM (2x2GiB and 2x1GiB) he's using PAE to support it all which works fine with the nv drivers but not with the official Nvidia ones.

Is there any other way to get around the 4GiB limitation on the i386 system and use the official Nvidia drivers, or to get the official Nvidia drivers to work with PAE, or should I tell o'l Mark he should probably go back to Debian if he wants/needs better graphics performance? Any ideas?

As far as I can tell he just wanted to run Xfce with the Xfwm composting engine, no 3D games in Wine or whatnot but he's really adamant on running the official drivers. Those Debain folk