Now that I got my parents a new computer, I've been looking around at the state of PC hardware, and was thinking it might be a good time for me to upgrade. I'm going to inherit their current and *ancient* K6-233 based machine, and was thinking I might gut it, put my current Abit KT7-RAID motherboard in the case, and invest in a new motherboard and CPU for my current PC. The KT7-RAID would then become my dedicated Linux box, instead of using VMware as I currently do.

Sooooo... I've been looking around, and for my price range, the AMD 1.7 GHz range Thoroughbred processor is looking very desirable. I hear they can be overclocked into the 2GHz range, which is way more than I need right now (I'm getting by okay on my Duron 800 @ 900.) As an Abit motherboard loyalist, the Abit NF7-S is looking like a winner. After throwing in 512 MB of memory, I was hoping to get my new PC together (using my existing drives, peripherals, etc) for less than $400.

So I'm just curious if anyone follows this stuff more closely than I do, and might have any reason to believe that (a) my choices are bad, (b) it's a bad time to upgrade because there's something much better on the horizon, or (c) if there are other options I should seriously consider other than the AMD T-Bred 1700 or Abit NF7-S. I've skimmed forums on these things, but so much of the other forums are noise about who gets higher Folding@Home stats, I can't really get a good picture.

I should point out that, other than the occasional MAME session, I'm not a gamer... I'm still running a Matrox G400 video card and don't have much reason to upgrade my video. I really want the upgrade to improve my overall system speed, software compile times, etc. rather than to push more frames in Quake3 or whatever.

So, anyone have any comments?