The eternal question - upgrade options

[priest77]

I'm considering one of the two following upgrade paths:

Asus P4PE w/R/L/SATA
P4 2.53ghz
512MB Corsair PC3200C2
Audigy2

Price: $697.00 (Newegg)

or

Asus A7N8X
AMD AthlonXP 2600 333mhz FSB
2x 256MB Corsair PC3200C2

Price: $685.00 (Newegg again)

I'm not really sure which way to go, the price difference is pretty much a non-issue and performance of both systems would be pretty close as well. I don't know, what do you think?

[The Baron]

I gotta say, having installed one (from Newegg) two weeks ago, the A7N8X is an amazingly easy board to configure....

Personally, I'd go with the P4 though. Hyperthreading and all that jazz...

[priest77]

Well I'm kinda in the same boat. I'm leaning more toward the P4 solution but I really like the NForce2. Both motherboards would be good for a couple of years with the P4PE supporting hyperthreading P4s and the A7N8X supporting Barton (probably). The AGP8X support of the A7N8X is somewhat attractive but it really doesn't matter all that much considering the perfomance benefit is minimal.

BTW, my current system is:

Asus A7V
1.3ghz AMD Athlon
512MB PC133
GeForce3

I'm keeping the GeForce3 for now, but I've been playing the waiting game for too damn long now. I think I've been saying, "I'll wait until 'X' comes out" for about a year now.