Need help building Graphics Workstation

[charlietee]

I want to build a dual processor system that will run Graphics programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Director, In Design, Macromedia programs, Soundfordge, etc...I had originally put a system together with the Epox 8K7A-R, Athlon 1.4GHz, 512meg's of Crucial PC2100 DDR ram, Maxtor Fire Ball Plus ATA/100 7200rpm 30gig hard drive, Antec SX1240 case and psu, Plextor 16x10x40x CD-RW, Hitachi DVD-CDROM, NEC floppy, Gainward GeForce2 Twin View Vivo Golden Sample video card, Diamond Monster MX300 sound card and Windows 2000 for the OS...
After posting in several forum's most people think I would be better off building a middle of the road dual processor Pentium3 system...I now am considering the Iwill DVD266-R motherboard and 1.0GHz Pentium3 processors using PC2100 DDR memory until there are more motherboard choices with the Athlon MP and Intel figures out what they are going to do...
I would like to be able to just buy a new motherboard and processors when all the choices for building a Pentium 4 or Athlon MP become clearer...

 

[Raincity]

Your better off going with a P4 system if you can afford it, Otherwise stick with the Tbird setup you originaly planned except dump the Gainward GF 2 and the MX300 sound card. The GF 2 does not have very good color saturation in high resolutions that is needed in Photoshop. Look into getting a Matrox card or a ATI Radeon card. The MX 300 drivers is not very stable in Win2K. The Santa Cruz, SBLIVE , Yamaha 744 chipset based cards and the Cmedia 8738 chipset based soundcards have good driver support in Win2K.

Rain