help me spend my money on an upgrade

[grepcomputers]

Ok, long post. Let me summarize:

I want a machine that:
-is fast and responsive (and smooth) across the board - I'm not merely looking for amazing game performance. If anything I am looking for general app performance.
-is stable and reliable (yay for tyan boards)
-is quiet (to a point)
-has some kind of upgrade path, and/or will last me a while

machine I was thining about:
dual AthlonMP 2600+
1gb PC2100 DDR RAM
tyan tiger MPX (S2466N-4M)
(with this hardware carried over from my current system)
Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE controller card (for the hard drives), will take advantage of the 64bit PCI slots
ATI Radeon 9500pro
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
WD 30GB 7200RPM
(2x) WD 120GB 7200RPM 8mb cache

or should I wait for intel's 800MHz FSB hyperthreading procs with faster dual-channel DDR?

10000RPM scsi/sata drives are out due to noise

cheers...
...grep

 

[snidy1]

Dual AthlonMP would be a waste unless you're using it for a server.

 

[grepcomputers]

Ok, then should I go with an opteron - they scored really well in some of the benchmarks (at least, the ones of interest to me)...

Or should I go with an 875 mobo and a P4 3.0/800MHz FSB?

cheers...
...grep

 

[snidy1]

Or should I go with an 875 mobo and a P4 3.0/800MHz FSB?

That's what I'm doing. There's not enough 64 bit software yet to buy an opteron cpu, it's backward compatable but a 32 bit cpu runs 32 bit software more efficiantly. It'll probably be two or three years before 64 bit will be the way to go. They're mostly made for servers for now.

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

875/P4 3.0 combo will do ya just fine and last a while. As much as I like AMD, thier dual-proc chipset is getting rather outdated and leaves not much future-proofing(Not like there is really future-proofing with pc components).