Syc, the thing is, the whole problem changes once you apply price sensitivity to it. That's where the Macs fall down - still.

You can get a Lindows system (or an operating-system-less system) on Walmart's website for $299 and there is a rumor that it may fall to $199. Unless you need to run highly graphic games, you'd hardly need anything else.

This is technologically true, but it has nothing to do with what I said; I merely stated that their policies regarding chipset/motherboard upgrading are good, i.e. that you don't need a new motherboard every year as the CPU form factor and chipset du jour require a new motherboard/cpu/memory purchase.
Many people do, including me. I am currently typing this on an Athlon-800, which is more than fast enough for 99% of what I need to do, and for what the vast majority of people need to do, since I don't need to play any particularly new games on it. If it did slow me down, I'd plop in a CPU that's twice as fast, for about $85. If I had an intel CPU at 800mhz and wanted to go faster, I wouldn't have a choice but to completely upgrade everything in my system. If you own a DDR-MB and an Athlon XP, upgrading the CPU is an easy - and cheap - way of improving system performance.
Read the article. The <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020821/athlonxp-02.html">point</a> isn't that such a setup was required, but that contrary to previous Thoroughbred cores tested, (even when extreme watercooling was previously employed), the CPU did manage to ramp up to much higher clockspeeds. That suggests that the CPU core does have a future at higher clockspeeds, Athlon overclockability having indicated such in the past. That's why the THG article, on its first page, states that "Intel, for all its ambition, has failed."

X.

Agreed, and I did read the entire article. I understand what you're saying now, but maybe "effortlessly" wasn't the best choice of words. If it can only run that fast for a "short while", I don't consider that effortlessly. It ran <I>stably</I> at <I>2.6GHz</I>, not 2.8.

And unfortunately, some of us are running our Linux server on a Slot-A Athlon setup, and there's really no room for us to upgrade either. :) I think once I upgrade to Red Hat 7.3 I'll go ahead and plop a new mobo/CPU combo in there. But that's another great thing about AMD; I can do that about as cheaply as I could by just upgrading the processor if it were a P4!

Updates
 

Couple of changes have been made and I'm still ~$80 under my original budget.

Video card & RAM stay the same. 80GB Western Digital "Special Edition" is the new hard drive (Hi, Tobiasly!). 2.53GHz Pentium 4. Asus P4S8x motherboard (wow these boards are fuckin' cool - I just built a system around one and it's <b>awesome</b>). Other than that, it's pretty much the same. Target build date is still late October; I'm half hoping the P4 3.06GHz will be out by then so I can build a 2.8GHz into my box for the same price. :) Also hoping for RAM prices to fall a bit... but I can live with their current prices.

Anyway, I'll post here more as things change, but I think that's pretty much what I've settled on as the system. In other words, probably not much more to say about it until late October. :)

Re: Updates
 

These are the ones with the larger cache, right? I'd be curious to see a comparison of those to see what kinda real performance boost that gives.

I'm in the middle of assembling my new server box. Got an Asus A7M266-D board -- MP capable, but I'm only putting in one XP 2000+ for now. It seems like XP's are easy to mod into MP's if I decide to later. It'll also be interesting to see whether I see any noticeable improvement with my 64-bit SCSI card in a true 64-bit PCI slot.

I've had two friends that have put XP's into SMP motherboards; one had miserable troubles and the other... had miserable troubles. Both are technologically aware. I bought MP's and have been sailing smoothly. :) In other words, good luck, but caveat emptor.

To answer your question, yes, they are.

Really? And they did the L5-bridge mod?

The latest BIOS of this board has a setting that says "don't check whether the CPU's are MP or not". Maybe that will help. Now you have me worried. :)

They did something. I wasn't paying much attention 'cause back then I wasn't real interested.

We're all using the Tyan Tiger MP though - it was the first generation SMP board for Athlon, so I'm sure the Asus one is vastly improved.

Buy everything from NewEgg - they'll take it all back, so if you put in 2 x XP's and it doesn't work, just send it back and ask for MP's. It's all good. :)

Now, modding your CPU probably voids the warranty....

hey, worst case scenario is you end up with 2 XP 2000+ boxes instead of 1 dual XP 2000+ box :)

I just did some pretty major computer upgrading, but not nearly at the level Mr. Dhamsaic did:

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ @ 1.67ghz ($105)
Mobo: Asus A7V333 (also $105)
RAM: 256mb Samsung PC2700 DDR333 SDRAM ($67)
Case: Crappy 300W case ($35)

Then I threw in the rest of these parts from my old computer:

HD: Seagate 4.3 GB @ 5400rpms
HD: Maxtor 15 GB @ 5400rpms
DVD-ROM: Creative Encore 6x
CD-RW: TDK VeloCDWriter 8x4x32
Video Card: PCI Voodoo5 5500 (64mb) (old computer didn't have an AGP slot!)
Sound Card: Soundblaster Live! MP3+
NIC: US Robotics something or other

*shrugs*

Hey man, if it fits your needs, no reason to do more. I do it because it is an <b>addiction</b>. Be glad you aren't like me. :)