"News" wrote in
:

I'm still running my Tyan Tiger 100 S1832DL with a single Celeron
366Mhz. The plan was to wait for P-IIIs to drop in price and go dual.
P-IIIs never dropped in price, so I never upgraded to dual. It re-taught
me, never buy hardware in anticipation of anything.
IMHO, wait until you need it, then buy what's best.

I guess I was lucky! P3-800s were selling here for $300 canadian each when I
got them. But I think you're right, as far as the future goes, it isn't
likely to happen again. The market's been segmented into PC vs Server. The
low-cost dual cpu workstation seems to be a dying breed. But I hope I'm
wrong!

The S1832DL was a pretty nice board in it's day. I don't think I could have
done any better with anything else. I wish it supported the faster P3s after
the 850mhz. I looked into those P3 1.4ghz upgrade kits but the vendors say
they don't work on dual-cpu boards.

Looks like you might be able to buy some P3 for cheap off ebay if you're
wanting to sqeeze any more out of that box. I can see why you would just
want put any resources into the a new system though.

http://tinyurl.com/yry4k

If you're upgrading to play Doom III, I'd say you have the right idea in
waiting until the game's (just about to be) released.
Over time, options increase, and prices go down.

Thanks for the confirmation. Sometimes you have an idea of how things are
going to turn out, but you don't really know because you don't hear a lot
from other people asking the same question. So it's good to hear if you're
on the right track, or of people are telling you're way off base and have
been living in a cave.

For the price difference between Opteron 240 and a dual MB and Athlon64
3000 and MB, you could bump up the CPU and/or video card to make a
significant difference on a gaming machine. It would seem for current
games at least, you're better off scraping pennies for the video card as
opposed to the CPU or anything else.

The coming NV40 vs R420 battle looks to be interesting. Through in the wait
for Doom 3 and HalfLife 2, and PCI Express. Should be a riot! I'd like to
wait until the dust has settled if I can. If not, I'll try and make whatever
I get in the meantime as cheap and disposable as possible, while getting the
most I can out of the old system as a server.

Thanks again for the info! It's much appreciated.