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If money is an issue, you ALWAYS get more bang for your buck spending the same amount of money on an AMD that you were gonna spend on an intel. Intel is a better chip--at the ultra high end--but if you want an 80 dollar motherboard and 80 dollar cpu, you ain't getting crap with intel--whereas you could get an AMD athlon 2500+, nforce 2 mobo, and then you could use the software on the nforce 2 mobo bios to overclock your speed to 3200+ w/ NO modification of the motherboard or chip. Just change your settings, and you have a SCREAMIN' computer. I don't know what 80 bucks gets you from intel--maybe a weaksauce celeron?!?
If you have bank, then just get the latest hyperthreading intel and overclock the frontside bus. They overclock very well, I hear.
But overcclock the mobo first.
And I don't really know about the serial ATA thing yet--a lot of mobos still have probs. I never had probs with my old raid mobo though--so who knows.
I say get a 110 dollar vga card, use pricewatch.com or newegg.com (relatively cheap--if you don't live in CA you don't pay salestax), and find a 50-80 dollar nforce 2 mobo, get an athlon 2500+ for 80 bucks, get a good heatsink for 10 bucks, pop it in and set your settings on the mobo to 400mhz fsb -- and wham, you got a 3200+ for 130-180 bucks or so. Pretty bitchin' for hardly any money, and since you don't modify the cpu to overclock it (they are all locked now, meaning you can't unlock the multiplier... and don't worry if you don't understand this, it doesn't really matter), you have the cpu still under warranty.
Hope this makes since. Its 3am.
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