Your DDR500 will work great on an nForce4 setup. If you get one of the new 90nm Athlon 64s, they overclock really well, so you should be able to get some use out of that memory. For example, the 2.0GHz 3200+ can overclock to 2.6GHz on high end air, so 2.5 should be pretty easy. This would give you some nice performance, somewhere in the ballpark of the new 3.46GHz P4EE, maybe even better. I've seen overclocked 3000+ processors beat the FX-55 at default speeds. As for DDR2, it's not coming for a while on the AMD front. They won't support it until 667MHz or 800MHz, depending on how the situation is at that time. Anyways, if you go look at the reviews of the new 3.46GHz P4EE, you'll notice that even with Intel's new 1066MHz FSB, they still don't get great gains from going to DDR2 533. Gains by AMD would be even less substantial; AMD's integrated memory controller is much more sensitive to latency than bandwidth, so until low-latency DDR2 gets fast enough, it's pretty pointless. Throw in the fact that it's like twice the cost, and it's pretty much worthless for the time being. Anyways, if you get an nForce4 mobo and a 3000+ or 3200+, you'll get great performance and a wonderful upgrade path. AMD will be making dual core processors on 939 that are compatible with today's mainboards, and the PCIe slots will ensure that you have plenty of graphics/peripheral upgrade potential as well. These nForce4 boards are supposed to be out within 2 weeks, but we'll see. Definitely before christmas, nVidia is not stupid enough to miss out on that buying season. I imagine the first boards will hit in week 2 of november, with a decent variety by week 1 of december. Not too long, and worth the wait if it is as good as they say it is. Whatever you do, though, I wouldn't upgrade to anything without PCIe, since otherwise it's not that much of a step up for you.
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