Sorry Squeakmail,
Choice seems to be - for EXACTLY - same price, either a Pentium P3 chip @ 700MHz or an AMD Athlone chip @ 750MHz.
My own evaluation (based on many mag and trade reports) is that an AMD will usually run most applications about 10% faster than the same clock speed Intel.
(Note that we're talking about the "K7" Athlon here - doesn't neccessarily apply to the older K6 series and the Intel Celerons etc!)
So, to keep it simple, if you can get the same clock AMD Athlon for a better price - go for it! If a faster AMD is the same price as a slower Intel - YES!!!
If you want to sound knowledgeable in the computer shop, just ask what speed "front side bus" the proposed board runs at (faster the better!) and make sure you buy the memory to match that speed.
InFin, Doesn't sound as if the board you suggest runs the "slot1" and "Slot A" (?) but sure, if you can get a board that supports both these (and hence, Pentium III and Athlone), that's a little bit of "insurance"
My point about the "new, six months from now" chips, is that they are going to have yet another set of socket types and so the mobos we buy today will be redundant again when we want to go to the processors running at 1.5GHz next year!!!
Hey, my current "burner" that I use for work is a Pentium II 450 with a mere 256Mbytes of (100MHz) RAM - and that runs Excel, Winword, IE, Outlook Express, as well as doing some pretty good rendering with CorelDraw in the forground at the same time!
[This message has been edited by ExSimGuy (edited 07 May 2000).]