Remember, the Athlon processor has a 200Mhz frontside bus. Pentium does not. And for the difference in cost, I'll keep my Athlon 600, and my Biostar M7MKA motherboard. This is a very fast combo, and it was way cheaper than a pentium setup. I am a professional and had the option of Intel. Pentium is great. Athlon is great too.Either way you'll end up with a great system for a fraction of what this kind of power would have cost ten years ago.