Veritas777; Just to get the negative out of the way, your buddy is full of it in regards to the 'number' of boards out there not supporting Win2k; none of the commercially available ones I've seen are like that. The =only= OS specific issue I've heard about is that the newest chipset that Intel is working on will not support the 9x line...as in they are not going to write drivers for 98-Me. Now, there supplier may not -supply them- with Win2k drivers, but check at Newegg; just hunt and check the specs across the new boards. Most of them still support 98... There is still far too large and installation base of Win2k users for -any- hardware vendor to ignore. Always remember that CompUSA is trying to sell you a preinstalled OS... That being said, he -is- right about the sweetness of the Atnlon 64 and SATA (current system is an Athlon 64 3000+ (the fastest one with 12 meg of L2 cache; the 3200+ and up have a 1 meg L2...and I haven't had any problems with the smaller cache yet). And you have a very nice chance to get a system that will give you lots of toys. My current board is a Gigabyte K8VNXP, and it came with 2 SATA channels, a 4 drive RAID configurable PATA connector set, and the standard 4 drive PATA that every mobo has (yes, that is a total of up to 10 drives with no add on card). And all of them are USB 2.0, most have AC97 integrated sound to turn off, and lots of other goodies like firewire. Running P4PP and P5 on this beast (with 1.5 gigs of DDR 400 Kingston ValueRam), I've had no issues at all with the memory controller being on the CPU. I have Vue and Premiere set up on the SATA drive I've installed ( running 4 PATA drives and 1 SATA, and waiting for an excuse to get #6), and the loading is noticeably smoother. It can be faster, but if you have Ultra 133 drives already, you won't really notice it, as SATA 1.0 only comes out to about a Ultra 150. But due to the serial nature of the buffer structure, you get a 'smoother' access behavior (the pauses you get in HDD access when you are pushing bytes hard are almost non existant with the SATA drives. The rate varies, but doesn't stutter). Hell, P5 even got along with the XP-64 beta I had on the system for a few weeks (had to take it off; there were no drivers for the RAID controller, and I was tired of not having my drives working; if Gigabyte ever gets some beta drives out for their RAID chip, I'll be trying it again). Vue4, VuePro, Truespace 5 all work smoothly with an Athlon 64. As well as Bryce 5, The Shade 7 demo, Mimic 2 pro, PSP 8, Photoshop LE, Premiere 6.0, Magix Audio Studio 7 and Video Studio 2. And Visual C++ 6. Haven't gotten around to messing with the Cinema4D CE6 yet.... How's that for a list of 'no troubles for me'....?