opinions for a budget system

[Bullion]

hi all, ive decided to build a reasnoble linux box. At the moment i have a athlon XP 1800@2000(1.7ghz) on a soltek kt333 board. Im thinking of gettin a duron and a ecs k7s5a mobo, I plan on selling the duron in a few months and swapping the xp with a thouroughbred on the kt333 board. I have a spare 128mb sdram so i can use this while i wait for cas 2 ddr 2700 to become readily available. And again swap with my main system. The problem is that i wanna play around with the new celeron 4, and fiddle with the platform. But again im on a budget, if i get the celeron 4 ill have to stay with the xp until the hammer or barton becomes available. Performance isnt too much of a concern on the linux box and i have no preference between AMD & Intel for a budget cpu, however it is deffinitly a factor on the Main rig. Im after peoples opinions on what they would do.

Cheers for the suggestions

[KenKun]

If the Celeron is what you want then get it and keep the XP for now ..

While Thoroughbred is nice, but it is not that BIG jump over XP, IMO.. i read few articles about it and benches show nothing significant that XP can`t do while OCed ...

Just my 2 cents
Regadrs

[Peter M]

Celeron 4 is pretty performance crippled, I'd say skip it - if it isn't for toying around and finding out for yourself

Duron plus K7S5A plus leftover SDRAM makes a good Linux box. Got that at home myself.

As for your main rig, you won't get much of a performance increase with anything on the market right now. Hammer will change that, mainly thanks to its tightly coupled memory controller.

regards, Peter