Recently, I have gotten the age-old itch. No, not *that* itch, but the itch to build a new machine. I finally realized that I just can't squeeze any more processing power out of my current rig. Let explain: many moons ago, when Windows 98 was still new and NT was the only Microsoft server offered, I built an uber-box. I bought the best I could afford and then some. It was some kind of schweeet. Dual PII 400, 256 megs of rams and a whopping 9 gig SCSI drive. This thing was a beast.

And now, its a boat anchor.

Believe it or not, its still my daily use machine. Sure, the drives have been upgraded, its seen its share of CD-RW's, a host of case fans and power supplies and lots more RAM. But the central core - the dually PII's are still the original and still processing bits.

I have added other machines to my stable, but they are function specific boxes. Not really set up as a good general purpose (gaming) machine.

I thought I wanted to go dually again, but I really do not like any of the mother boards currently on the market. And the ones that ARE offered, seem to have all sorts of odd bugs and quirks.

So far, my favorite if the Asus P4C800-E DLX with an INTEL 875P chipset.Its a bit pricey, but it does offer all the bells and whistles that I am looking for. and as an added bonus, it seems to be stable (at least in the hardware review sites.).

Video card - its going to be an ATI - the current offerings of NVIDA just don't seem to be on par, and NVIDIA has been releasing crappy drivers in the last year. what a shame. Considering that all the boxes are currently running NVIDIA chipsets.