[Bungleau]

Hey, Kev, just dropping in here. I still haven't built up my machine, but I'm working on it. I plan on stopping in at one of the local PC shops here to check out their bare-bones PCs -- a minimal unit that may give me most of what I need. I'm not against building completely from scratch, but I find myself wondering just how many times I need to screw a motherboard into a case... I'll let you know what I come up with tomorrow. The new machine will probably be born in the next month or so, after I set up a linux server in here this week. Going to take advantage of professional "semi-down" time to get some mostly personal computer things configured.

As for the AMD speed thing, the real measure of performance these days is less the internal speed of the CPU, but how fast it can get things done -- and the two are not always identical. AMD (and Cyrix, if they're still around) have made a practice of implementing the same technology that Intel uses, only doing it better -- so they get better performance out of "older" technology. It's not that what they've got is old, but they have worked at improving its performance. So they broadcast numbers based on the throughput you can expect.

It's all marketing, which isn't all bad...