This is my dilema.... I am going to build a PC myself in the coming weeks...however i am not sure which processor to buy. I have read reviews on the P4 and they dont seem to be good... well not 70% of them anyway. The PIII seems to be the more stable and suggessted processor to use. And as a after thought the AMD Athlon has out performed the P4 in recent tests.. So i would like to hear from people who have are using the processors mentioned and let me know what they think of it and finally what i should use to build my system. I will be using my system for applications such as office, surfing the net, building web sites, and maybe some games now and again but nothing too powerful. All help is greatfully appreciated and thanks in advance Waks

get a AMD ATHLON Xp

Go with an AMD Athlon and a good heatsink/fan and you will be set. You will get top of the line performance and save money. If you want a great system but don't need top of the line than you can go with AMD Duron. That'll save you big bucks and still give you great performance.

Just be careful of the heat, it can get pretty hot in an AMD case without at least a couple of fans

Have to agree with all that have suggested Athlons or even the duron in the previous posts. Athlons are cheaper than a P3..unless you go with an athlon XP. I kind of regret building up my P3...could have saved over a hundred dollars by building an athlon that would have been faster! Durons are good too if you have a low budget! Plus you can get the Athlons with the 266FSB and use DDR ram if your board supports it. And yes, as Steve suggested, you must keep it cool. A good CPU Fan and a couple case fans are are essential.

Built a new P4 2 weeks ago P1.9, MSI 845 Ultra ARU; 512DDR. Incredibly fast, XP compatable and very stable. CPU temps at conatant 14C! Don't know what reviews you've read about the P4's but I did a lot of research and this mobo/chip combo reviews very highly with DDRram and outperforms anything I have used. AMD will run a little bit faster (you probably will not notice the difference) but it will not be as stable, run as cool and most VIA boards are not as XP friendly as Intel based boards. To sum up, both great options, it just depends what your using if for! PS Don't go with the PIII - waste of money;I upgraded from a PIII 600 and this is another world. JRF

I built an Athlon 1.4 DDR systems a few months back and had nothing but problems with it. I have now gone back to Intel and purchased a P4 1.8A with DDR ram. It wont be as fast as an Athlon system but is stable. You probably won't really notice the difference in speed unless you sit running benchmarks all day. My vote is for Intel, on an Intel board.. VIA has given me to many headaches. Jason.