Would you call me crazy??

i wanted to buy a p4 2.8GB/800FSB, mobo and 1 Gb DR400 for video editing...total $1200 but then i saw a second system Dual p3 1B Ghz (256kb L2) intel SLT2 mobo 512 ECC PC133 SDRAM SCSI 160 2x 18 7200rpm seagates $600.... what do you guys think??? is it a good trade-off in waiting for the athlon fx?? how much less of a performance is the dual p3 ??? the bottleneck would be the RAM , i would think? PS. the bad news though is NO AGP...so i cant use my r9800pro

When were you planning on getting the Athlon FX ? Could you "put up with the P3 system" until then ? I doubt it, specially if you have an idle 9800 pro lying around. I would get the P4 2.8/800 without a doubt. If you are going to sell it when you get the Athlon FX (drool) then I'm sure it's resale value will be more than P3 as well. I assume you are waiting till the prices on the FX's drop. Just remember the Athlon 64 FX51's require registered memory which is expensive. There are reports that the next generation FX's might be using normal unregestered memory though.

Trust me once you see the performance of the 2.8Ghz/800FSB you will slap yourself that you even though about going dual P3-1Ghz. I have a Dual P3-1Ghz server box (my FTP) and it has 1.2 TB of storage and rocks but it in NO way compares to my P4 system with hyper-threading with a single CPU. For the price differance you will be very thankful you paid the extra. The dual channel DDR makes a big differance also. And HELL yes you should use the 9800 Pro.

Dear god, the concept of having to try to do video encoding on a Pentium III nearly gave me an embulism. That is to say, most people, especially around here, would agree that the P3 is woefully outdated, no matter the deal on it.

Don't be so quick to bury the p3.Coppermine cpu's still have a pretty good resale value and still out perform a p4 mhz for mhz(p3@3.2ghz anyone):cool: I used to get 11fps encoding divx on my old p3 733, i get 32fps with the same encode on my p4 2.66@2.9ghz, you do the numbers.