Truth be told the PC hardware industry is going through a transition period at the moment.  We're moving to PCI-Express, BTX formfactor cases & motherboards, multi-core CPU's and 64bit computing on the desktop.  I think it will take another 12 months to shake out all the bugs.  So just be aware that any PC you buy now will in 24 months time look decidedly outdated and won't have much in the way of upgrade path.  But I'm sure if you were to go top of the line A64 your PC will still be trucking a long at a fair clip when you next want to upgrade... :)  It's not like your Office Apps will need another 2Ghz to do calculate your budget in OO.org.

Regards

On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 10:16, David Nicholls wrote: 
Hi gund, I must say I agree with oliver on this topic... The athlon cpu
could well be the way to go.  Most of the processors (to coin a phrase)
"honk along" at VERY nice speeds.  The physics dept at the waikato uni
uses almost exclusively a64s.  Hoever the 32 bit cpus are just as good
and I believe they are going to be dual coreing them in the near future.
There are some VERY nice mobos out for these boards...
www.tomshardware.com is a good place to go for reviews of chips, boards
and gfx cards... They not only test on win systems but a linux build as
well so you get an idea of how much trouble they went to to get things
working.

Basically you need to have a look, have a think about the details of
what you want in your system, then come back and ask us if its any good
and we can tear it to shreds for you:)
Just don't forget the floppy drive ;)

Cheers...
david





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