In your experience does money spent vs capability received seem to follow a fairly straight tragectory or are there certain price points where spending an extra hundred or two makes an extraordinary difference?

 I need to build a machine that can deal with large database (up to 2 BG) queries and 3d display of results, video editing/conversion (touch up work and analog to digital but not professional full length movie projects), and automated formating of multiple (up to 1000)  text documents through VBA all on a daily basis. While these big jobs are going on in the background I'd like to be able to do less tasking things in the foreground (spreadsheet, word, internet). Background jobs can finish when they want so long as I can stay productive up front. The only games might be things a flight sim or age of empires but no quake (I grew up with pinball machines).

 Any machine from a Tualatin to some smp monster could do what I'm asking but I'm just wondering where I need to start positioning myself price wise so as to have a system that will let me continue on with my general work while chugging away at its other duties in the background. Perhaps this is a case for smp which people generally regard as overkill but the one area it does seem to shine is in multitasking even if specific apps aren't optimized for it. I will have a dual boot Windows 2000 Advanced Server, XP Pro OS set-up.

 Excluding monitor my feeling is that for about $800 I can put together a machine that will do the above but will be just hanging in there if I have analog to digital conversion going on while running a VBA macro across multiple documents and surfing in the foreground. In the $1200 range I could probably get what I want but may not be able to buy premium equipment (Asus, PC Power & Cooling, Seagate Cheetah, etc) and the added stability as a result, and for $1600 pretty much get  the works (P4 533 FSB).

 Since the FSB and disks seem to be bottlenecks a system using some Intel CPU for a 400 MHz FSB and an IDE RAID (0, 5 or 1+0) would be a place to start but this is only newbie guesswork. It would be nice to be able to upgrade once but this isn't too likely given the pace of innovation although an Intel roadmap I saw recently showed a 3.x GHz chip for the 400 MHz motherboards in '03. Another scenario is a dual 1.2 Athlons smp which is a great value but has the extra heat, care and noise that come with it (more experienced builders put together relatively cool quite systems but I'm not sure I could do this as a first time build).

 This is as far as my knowledge takes me at present. If any of you feel you can fill in a gap or two I'd appreciate it.

 Thanks for all the help.

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