MB selection help, Xeon, Opteron, Athlon; Dual or Single

[ROKKSTAR]

Well it's been awhile since I stopped by here.

This past weekend my good friend P3-700@852 gave it's last breath; along with 1 drive in a Raid 0 config.

So here's what I need:
A mother board that will run Photoshop, and AVID, very fast & be stable.
4+ gig's DDR400 or faster
AGP 8
At least 1 64 bit PCI slot, 6 slots total would be nice.
will be adding U360 raid in time, currently running U160 raid 0
OS is Win2k3.

So after reading many posts I'm perplexed as to which direction to go.
Dual or single CPU; Xeon, P4, Opteron, or Athlon MP.

While overclocking is a nice option I'm more concerned with building a blistering fast machine.
If the AMD options will perform as good or better and save me some cash then that would be great too.

any and all help appreciated since I need to build this thing this weekend.
James / NYC.

P.S. price is not my first concideration

 

[Peter]

If you want to go past 4 GBytes of RAM, you'll need a Xeon or an AMD64. P4 and Athlon MP have only 32-bit address space, for a TOTAL of four gigabytes, including I/O and everything. Xeon has 36, AMD64 has 40 bits of address space.

If it's got to be fast, I recommend you have a look at the Tyan 2885 (Thunder K8W) board. Dual Opteron (200 series of course), four memory channels (eight DIMMs), twin PCI-X busses plus one legacy PCI, AGP Pro110 8x. That should be a step forward from that PIII

Thunder K8W

Ain't no such thing as a free lunch though - that kind of mainboard wants an EATX case and power supply, as well as ECC registered RAM (DDR PC3200). You should have four identical DIMMs to populate all the memory channels (two per processor).