I appreciate all the responses I've had over the last couple days in my search for a system that can mega-multitask for under $1500 (excluding monitor). Many seemed to say if they had $1200 then something serious could be done to crunch away at multi-media, large database, and VBA scripted processes in the background while continuing with word processing, surfing in the foreground. I don't see myself doing all five at once but typically at least one heavy-duty chore will be running while I continue with other lighter tasks. The idea is a beefy general-purpose multi-tasker vs. a high end gamer.

 Too keep costs down dual Athlons were most often recommended with additional care required on my part to keep noise and heat at acceptable levels. Now I'm hoping for blue prints to sample rigs or perhaps a listing of the core components of such a system (mb, cpu, disks, ram). I need to keep it around $1300 otherwise it'll take more diplomacy than I think I can generate to explain why we need to spend so much for a 'computer' when the local gaming shop that's going out of business can sell us their 800 MHz Celeron for $500.

 Here some advice I've had so far. Please render your own artistic solution.

  "I would go with an 18 gig SCSI 10k rpm main drive and two 120 gig IDE drives in a RAID 0 array for your temp/video editing drive."

  "For the price of a single 2.53 GHz P4 you could get dual 2100+ and still have more than a hundred $$$ to spare.  You could get ECC DDR for less than the price of rambus.  "

  "With a multi-processor system and an SMP-compatible OS, standard applications can run concurrently with much less degradation in performance. Even if the applications themselves are not SMP-optimized, the operating system will multi-thread the programs themselves and distribute the tasks to each of the CPUs."

  "AMD socket A is a good platform with a lot of headroom for future upgrades, on the other hand, Intel is discontinuing sockets 370 and 423 in favor of socket 478.  To my knowledge, no dual socket 478 motherboards exist. Intel's SMP Xeon and Itanium solution cost waaaay too much to be considered. Dual Athlon MPs and dual P3 would both be good setups if you provide them with a LOT of RAM. "

  "Your best bet right now is definitely going to be a dual Xeon solution. It will give you the power you need, plus the "response" for your foreground applications. I would suggest something with Rambus, since you will be doing things that will stress the memory/cpu bus more than anything will. Get a nice board that fully supports the 533FSB, to allow for future upgrades. Get a single, very fast SCSI drive. "

  "Dual XP processors are a good way to go and you can use like dual 1800s or something of that nature. As far as quiet cooling goes, it only has to do with the quality of stuff you use. Expert builders know that X HSF is better than Y HSF for noise reasons, etc. Use nothing other than Panaflo case fans, and look for a heat sink and fan (HSF) that has a low decibel rating but is still decent in cooling. "

  "The AMD 1800+ CPU and Maxtor D740X hard drives are two examples. The Asus A7M266D is quite a nice board if you decide do go with dual processors.  With a good 400W ATX12V PSU it should be a solid machine for a few years I'd think. Extra heat? Yes. A few additional case fans and decent copper heat sinks should do the trick."

  "As you approach the latest and greatest technology, you will find that you can easily spend twice the money for only 10% more performance. P4 Xeons (specifically the motherboards for such), 15k SCSI hard drives, and GeForce4 4600's are good examples of such issues (when compared to dual XPs, 7200rpm IDE hard drives, and Radeons, respectively). "

  "I would not pay attention to cost. I would look at what specs you need and then see what the best pricing is for those particular specs. If you sacrifice on specs because of price, my experience is that you are going to regret it later down the track because you may realize that some component of the system does not stand up to what you need it to do, and if this is true, doing things the cost wise way around may prove to be more trouble than it is worth."

  "If you are going to be serving in a disk intensive environment, U160 SCSI is the only thing to consider. SCSI can handle multiple I/Os concurrently whereas IDE is single threaded."

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