JohnR went out and got an Athlon 64 X2 4400, which by all accounts is very nice - I broke down and got the same system myself about a month later

Veeeeery fast (the 4400 is the slower clocked one with 1MB of L2 per core, as opposed to the 4600 which is clocked quicker but only 512k per core. The 4800 is too expensive to even think about!). MB is an Asus A8V deluxe (the KT800pro chipset does interleaved DDR), with Crucial Ballistix CAS2 DDR400 memory (2x512).

Only problems have been the memory (2-2-2-8 doesn't seem to work; 2.5-2-2-8 works fine though and is near as dammit the same performance), and my aged graphics card which didn't like a dual-CPU system - strange, as it's a 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 which is designed for CAD stuff... but the last driver update was 3 years ago

Hugo