Personally I wouldn't advise for the FX-51 because of its limited socket line. It should end in Q2 04 and from then on, you will have to change the entire system.
My personnal recommendation would be a 3200+ A64, and its performance shouldn't be over 10% below the A64 FX. In fact, the benchmarks below should be pretty convincing for FS2004: <A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031023/nvidia-nv38-nv36-40.html" target="_new">http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031023/nvidia-nv38-nv36-40.html</A>
Here the benchmarks reveal the game played at 4X AA and 8X Aniso filtering, both the common image quality enhancements. I am assuming they had maximum detail as they said in their description. I remember how storms and clouds always deteriorated performance too. Performance is not too shabby at all. In that case, consider the A64 already way ahead in performance over the 3.2GHZ P4 when you look at this Extreme Tech test (albeit with low detail to check out CPU effect) <A HREF="http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1276894,00.asp" target="_new">http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1276894,00.asp</A>
The A64 is clearly ahead of the 3.2GHZ, and it most definitely is a better buy buget-wise and for potential upgrade paths.
You should then focus on the video card, where an XT is about 7% better than the 9800PRO. You choose if it's a better value. Note the 256MB on the PRO model finally seems to make use of its extra RAM space for more textures with a slightly better performance.
In my opinion, the A64 + a 9800 XT will not fail you, they bring some nice savings over the FX-51 system who asks for expensive ECC memory. To augment the value even more, a 9800PRO, which really is far from being bad relatively to the high-end XT, is a great buy as soon its price should drop to 250-300$, thanks to the XT and FX5950 causing trickling in current cards to lower price ranges.
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<A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/album.html" target="_new"><font color=blue><b>This just in, over 56 no-lifers have their pics up on THGC's Photo Album! </b></font color=blue></A> :lol: