Nos, I was simply stating that at 700 mhz already other parts of the computer become a problem. Ram, Current video cards, and slow hard drives are also parts of your computer that need to be looked at and worked with more than just constantly increasing your cpu. And at the speed some of those components are upgrading they would likely never catch up to the Cpu.
Your hard drive and your video card are probably the biggest players in having something run smooth. If your hard drive starts going bad it will become the worst nightmare to anything you try to run (ex: every 2 minutes your pc freezes for 10 seconds in quake). If you have a bad video card you could come across a million problems, so thats pretty self explanatory. I don't have a link, so this will probably come back to bite me in the ass, but I am pretty sure last time I checked any benchmarks at all, everything was pretty close. Why? Well, what most reviewers concluded was everything had peaked at the video card and ram and the Cpu wasn't a limiting factor.
All I am getting at here, is not that you shouldn't waste your money on a p4 but more that you shouldn't attribute all your computer's success to the p4. My PC is rock stable and I don't give the Athelon my thanks for that, more so win2000. If I was running win98 I could probably say my PC wasn't rock stable anymore, but that is another story.
This may probably be my last post, Nos, as tomorrow is my last workday I don't plan to check the forums over the weekend
FYI - There is some reassurance in name brand. My work refuses to buy athelon just because they think all their customers would blaim it for any and all problems, where they won't blaim intel. So if you take the same 'fear of the newcomer' approach that my work does, then I can understand where you come from.
-skace