I am in the process of saving up to upgrade to a Pentium 4. I won't be making the Rolls Royce of computors but neither will I be making a Chevy Chevette! In other words, I want to do well without spending a ton just because it is out there. I want to do this upgrade right. My questions are as follows:

1.What motherboard(s) do you recommend and what ones would you say I need to
avoid like the plague?

2.What Pentium 4s TRULY outperform P3s? Believe it or not the higher end P3s are in more demand than the low end P4s because they perform better.

3.Truly, what RAM is best??? I get confused here!

4.In your opinion, how long will the Nvidia GForce 4 chipset be viable before we are forced to go with AGP 8X/DX9 video cards?

Thanks ahead of time!

Why not go with the Athlon XP? I just built a system, and its a screamer. Is cheaper than the P4, and uses DDR Ram (this is the best). There are P4 boards that use DDR, but I'm not sure of their status. You might get stuck with Rambutt. ATI Radeon will give you better 2d and equal 3d to the nVidia boards, but anything is viable as long as YOU the user are satisfied with the results. I have a perfectly good GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB card. I would love a new Radeon, but I have no reason yet, I am still satisfied with the performance. I got a Soltek Via 333 board, and am using an Ultra-133 IDE HDD. Super-silent maxtor drive. This system rocks.