I'm in the process of trying to decide what type of system my first homebuilt should be. Next year will be bringing out some notable advances (dual channel DDR/533 FSB Xeons from Intel and Sledgehammers from AMD) so until the dust settles and the prices drop I've decided the following two options might work for me:
A
Get some experience by building a ~$800 system that'll do Office XP, MP3 and scanning chores. When I build the newer smp system in early '04 'A' can become the machine to run old Win 95/98 software.
B
Get some smp experience by building a ~$1200-$1500 system that in addition to the above will handle speech recognition and analog to digital conversions while working on other things. When I build the newer smp system in early '04 'B' can become the server for a SOHO setup and run old Win 95/98 software.
The Tualatin seems to be the chip for either scenario although I'm not sure there will be much chance to upgrade these setups much beyond their initial state.
Would anyone care to state simply (i.e. $800 Tualatin system) or elaborately (i.e. chip, motherboard, disk set-up, etc) how they might approach this situation given that the higher end capabilities (speech, digital conversion) aren't necessities but niceties and the extra $500 - $700 spent on 'B' is not an over riding factor?
hardware
prices 
