I had this debate about a month ago for the sake of a personal machine and what to populate a development lab for my school with. In both cases, this was the result: Athlon 500 128 MB RAM Voodoo 3 3000 SB Live Value Sound card For personal use, I wanted a powerful machine all around. The Athlon provides that. The dual Celerons are cheap, but you lose on the bus speed and the cache (128kb/processor vs. 512kb on the Athlon). There's a huge bottleneck in accessing the system buses, including memory, and the Athlon is your best choice these days to _try_ to alleviate that. It's run without a glitch for about 40 days straight - it's a workhorse and has not disappointed me. Besides, Win98 can't do SMP, so one processor would be wasted whenever you're using that OS. For the lab at my school, we got an Athlon 500 and a PIII 500 and did some rudimentary benchmarks - compiling the kernel, xfree86, and glibc; running a 21,000 vertex shortest path C program; and some other more qualitative comparisons. In each case, the Athlon outperformed the PIII from between 5 and 20%. Granted, those are not representative of how the system handles under several users and/or system-intensive processes, but they have my vote. Do get a good motherboard. First decide what you want for a processor - that will narrow your choices down. Don't buy an ATI video card - get something that has an active Linux development team and something that you can play q3 arena with. Voodoo 3 has both of those. Other than that, think Riva TNT. Diamond has a problem with supporting their older cards that has turned me off from them. They won't update their drivers past a certain point (for Windows), and I think that really sucks, IMO. More RAM is always better, esp. under NT and 98. X and netscape will benefit from it, too. On the topics of NICs - I've used both Intel and 3com cards a _lot_, and they both perform very well. From personal experience, I recommend the latter. From my professional position, I would say the former. :) Oh, and get a clicky keyboard. and a logitech 3 button mouse. -pat mochel -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/