Need Advice- Best of Everything!

[Wabbit]

Hi! I am going to put together a new system, and for once in my life, money is not the issue! So I want to out together the absolute best system I can, as far as performance, reliability, etc. Ability to upgrade is also an issue.

For instance, I am trying to decide between the Athlon XP w/ DDR memory, or the P4 w/ the new architecture and RDRAM memory. I've had an Athlon 1Ghtz Tbird with an Asus A7pro mobo for a year, and have not been overly happy with it, mainly due to heat and odd problems with the mobo/bios and the lousy support from Asus, so I have been thinking of going back to Intel. Another consideration leading me to this is that it looks like DDR is going to hit a speed ceiling and RDRAM is going to reduce in price and may be the wave of the future.

As for mobos, I hope to find very high end specs: USB 2.0, fasted IDE, bus, etc. and as many pci slots as possible.

So can some of you guru's give me suggestions on the Intel/AMD conflict, as well as good motherboard makers as well as the best mobo models? Thanks!

 

[o1die]

I upgrade alot (2-4 times a year, and sell off my old stuff in the local paper). I chose an sis 645 board for it's overclocking and ddram usage. If Amd's hammer is a significant improvement over the overclocked p4, I can switch back to amd without having to dispose of rambus memory. My epox 4sda+ is running a 1.6a at 2.22 (138 fsb) with only a .10 voltage increase. Memory scores are lower than with rambus, but the 4sda+ is cheaper than any decent Intel 850 board. You may also want to invest more in the video card than the cpu. You can still find deals on ddram; I use plain old pc2100 micron and it runs pretty fast at 138 fsb with 1/1 ratios.