said:

The new mchine will be primarily for CPU- intensive stuff, such as
high quality audio compression and editing or high definition
fractals, and also general "house-office" stuff. I'm not much into
games or fast 3-D video, and am not planning to overclock, or not
extensively.

My present two year old machine ... Athlon 1400.

This was outdated two years ago.

MOTHERBOARD:

MSI K8N NEO Platinum

CPU: Barton XP2800 (or XP2500 OC to FSB 400 ?)

Bump up to an Athlon64 3000+ or 3200+
--
Mac Cool