I would appreciate a second opinion: I am currently running dual PIII 1 Ghz cpus and 1GB RAM on an ABIT VP6. I like to play games like quake 3 arena and Halflife. I multitask on a regular basis. I edit video and other such tasks that utilize both cpus; however, I do over tax the system sometimes. Is it worth building a P4 2.5 Ghz machine? In other words, on the average, will the performance be noticably better? All replies are appreciated.

you mean, replacing a dial pentium 3 machine with a single processor based p4 machine? No way! Don't do it. Actually a dual proc based machine is not needed for day to day work, but If you already have one, don't replace it. Dual proc gives true multitasking...On my P4 overclocked to 2.79 mhz, the system still becomes sluggish when some music is being encoded in the background or some source code is being compiled... But not with a dual proc system. I think you should stay with your configuration, and love it!

how about the p4 with hyper-threading technology?

thats just advertizing.

Well, actually the Hyper Threading does work to an extent, but obviously it cant be as good as two procs. You could go for a Xeon if you really needed the speed... though thats a bit overkill