Actually, it kinda depends on what you want to do. Do you have any experience overclocking? If so, the new 90nm socket 939 chips are great performers. The 1.8GHz 3000 and 2.0GHz 3200 both overclock to 2.6GHz, a 45% overclock in the case of the 3000+, and that's on AIR! At these levels, performance is equal to a FX-55 (less cache, but faster bus speeds). Even if you play it conservative, say 2.3-2.4GHz with a 3200 or even 3500, that's still 3800+ levels of performance. My recommendation would be for a 3200+ with a good heatsink and good RAM, maybe 1GB crucial ballistix (great performance, great overclocking). Besides, dual core will be a must in the future, anyways, so getting a lower end 3200+ now and dropping in a dual core CPU in a year or 2 makes for an easy, pain-free upgrade. Even if you run at stock speeds, the 3500 is about $300 cheaper than the 3800+, and only about 8% slower. With the extra cash, you could spend an extra $100 on the ballistix, netting you about the same gains as the 3800+ over the 3500, plus you save $200, plus you can overclock more. Since you are looking for the most time for your money, the $300 extra for a few months more time isn't really worth it, I would think. My advice is to work the price points - from FX-55 down to 3800, there are marginal drop-offs. Then, from 3800+ to 3500+, there is that huge dropoff, followed by smaller drops to the lower-end models, so the 3500+ will be the best value in terms of buying you a lot of time for not too much money, unless you overclock, then I'd go with the 3200+.
As for the motherboard, I wouldn't give up on nforce4 yet. This week, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI are all supposed to be shipping their boards. Gigabyte even had one of theirs reviewed by anandtech, and the results were amazing. The board was about 5% faster than nforce4 reference, which was faster than the nforce3 ultra, plus you get all the new nforce4 goodies. Prices are expected to be in line with nforce3 prices, so you'll basically be getting that extra performance and features for free (maybe a little bit extra at first, but still, not too much). If you want your computer to last a long time, you're gonna want a PCIe board, maybe more for the expansion slots than the graphics, since the new high bandwidth devices, like SATA-II controllers, Creative's Soundblaster Zenith cards, 10GB Ethernet, etc. will all need the speed.
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