Thanks Neal for your suggestive comments.

Neal Collins wrote:

> My suggestion is to stay away from the Celeron processor.  Its
> performance just leaves a lot to be desired.  And just about any Athlon
> XP will blow away the Celeron.

Point taken.

> The Athlon XP 2600+ will be very competitive with Pentium 4's up to
> about 2.6ghz in speed, and maybe even higher.  And it will save you lots
> of money.

> If you really want to build a computer that will last you a much longer
> time, I would look at the Amd Athlon 64 series.  Not only do they beat
> the same speed rating Athlon XP's, but they easily hold their own
> against all P4's and since they are 64 bit, they will be ready for the
> transition to 64 bit OS's in the coming years.

> If you let us know your budget and what you do with this system, we may
> be able to provide even more detailed recommendations.

The computer I am writing to you with is an Asus P2B,  with Celeron
300A overclocked to 450Mhz which I assembled with a lot of hand
holding from PCBuild subscribers in 1999. I needed this system to
manipulate scanned photos in Photoshop for a Web site I was
designing.

As for the new computer, I don't have any special mission for it. I
was just thinking that it would be nice to have a second computer
for redundancy and which would give me the option of networking
them. So I am trying to do this as economically as possible which
would rule out the Athlon 64 series.

My criterion in deciding on what hardware to get is to stay 1 or
1.5 generations behind the latest and greatest because of the
enormous discount from its original cost for such gear. I would
buy the mb processor combo new for the warranty as well as
the hd and the CD/DVD drive. On the other hand I have had very
good luck buying used non-mechanical peripherals like SCSI
and AGP or sound cards on EBay from sellers who have
upgraded.

So that is why I thought of getting one of the many Athlon XP
processors, which one I'm not sure. I think I read that the 2600
was the first of this series to be able to turn off the computer if
the CPU's temperature passed a certain point. This seems
like a really neat feature.

Asus A7V8X, Epox 8K9A71, Gigabyte GA-757K8L and Abit
VA-10 boards are available bundled with the various XP
processors at pretty reasonable prices. Are there any known
serious pluses or minuses regarding these boards?

Thanks in advance for your advice regarding these various
questions.

Michael Eisenstadt

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