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 -----Original Message----- From: Gund Wehsling [mailto:Gund.Wehsling(a)computerland.co.nz] Sent: Wednesday, 8 September 2004 11:56 am Subject: [wlug] New Workstation Hardware Advice Hi I am thinking about getting a new workstation for study/development. It will be a beast. Apart form the favourable reviews of NVidia graphics cards here, are there any preferences to motherboards? IDE RAID controllers? I have been living in laptop land for a while now and have lost contact with desktop options and hardware. Ideally, the desktop will have 3GHz Processor or thereabouts 4GB RAM 2x120GB hard drives (one for mirror / backup) DVD Writer The machine will primarily be used for VMs, so throughput would be nice and the RAM _needs_ to be big. Also, as I am a struggling NetWare engineer, a nice place that sells this and helps with finance would be a plus. Any thoughts in this direction, assume I am ignorant please. Many thanks Gund