Bryan, If you are looking for the best price/performance ratio, I would go with a 2500+ Athlon XP (should be about $80-90).
As for the motherboard, the nForce 2 400 Ultra boards are very nice and have come down in price ($100 or less for a decent board). The 2.6 kernel has very nice support for this chipset. I have a nForce 2 board and I have everything working in Linux. If you would rather go with VIA, the newest chipset is the KT600. Both (I'm not 100% sure about the KT600) have dual-channel memory which theoretically improves performance. DDR is still going to be the standard for a while. Even though DDR II is coming out, it will have the same performance (but bigger cost) for a while (because of high latency). I would get at least 512 MB of DDR2700 (if the CPU has a 333 MHz bus) or DDR3200 (if the CPU has a 400 MHz bus) memory. If you get a motherboard that has dual-channel memory make sure to get 2 sticks of RAM, because you must place one in each channel to get the performance boost. For a video card (if you are a gamer), I would look at either an ATI Radeon 9600XT or nVidia GeForceFX 5700 Ultra. Both can be found for about $160 or less and will be able to handle Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 with moderate settings (assuming both actually get released). Both nVidia and ATI are releasing the new generating of video cards in the next month or two (ATI Radeon X800 and nVidia GeForce 6800), so prices will most likely drop around that time. Have you looked at newegg.com? They have very reasonable prices and the shipping is free a lot of the time. For barebones kits at newegg.com, you can look here: http://www.newegg.com/app/manufactory.asp?catalog=3&DEPA=0. A lot of the PC architecture will be updated this year and into next year, so I wouldn't spend a lot on a new system. PCI Express will replace the current AGP and PCI slots and x86-64 (64-bit chip that can run 32-bit code natively) will replace the current 32 bit chips. You can buy x86-64 chips from AMD now, but AMD is replacing both desktop sockets 940 and 754 with the newer socket 939 this year (leaving socket 940 for servers only and 754 for Duron-class processors). I hope this helps, sorry about the length =). -- Matt Strum ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
