Very good point, Becco. If you go with the Socket 754 Athlon 64, I wouldn't use anything less than Kingston ValuRam, for instance. One stick of =almost= anything will most likely boot...but with the signal characteristics of the onchip controller and FSB, mixing two brands is almost a sure fired guarantee of not booting.The '64 is even more unforgiving that most. I've found the ValuRam to be the cheapest that has consistency between batch runs. The socket 939940 still require registered ECC Ram, so that will be an investment, not a purchase. But you have to balance that with getting a dual core processing system with the change of a single chip. Motherboards are next, and you can choose feature vs flash vs stability. If it's stable you want, I have yet to find a better, more hardworking board that Tyan's. They build all of them on the assumption that they are going to be workstation or server boards (if there has been a change in management, this is not promised; just what I know from the past). I have a couple of Tomcat 4's and a Supersocket 7 S1590 that will still boot. I won't count the number of Abit boards that have tanked on me inside of 18 months. Feature vs flash you can get at any hardware website. I've had good luck with Gigabyte, as well. Personally, one of the most indespensable items you can obtain is a Promise card. This adds (depending on the card you get) two more IDE PATA ports (or 4 SATA), so you can hand 4 more drives onto your system without having to reformat and move stuff around. And you can get one that does RAID, or just adds drive connectivity, and doesn't require you to disable your IDE ports on the motherboard itself.