Ironically, the P4 is now the value option :) There are, by the way, inexpensive socket 939 Athlon64's out also. The dual core models will definitely suffer on a single channel memory bus, but they'll still scream -- AMD's planning to give each one a full cache hierarchy (1 MB L2 for each, I think) to mitigate that. No matter which socket you choose, it will be a good upgrade option, but it will definitely be available for socket 940 (Opteron) and socket 939 (FX) before for socket 754. And btw, socket 754 isn't the long-term platform. Sockets 939 and 940 are, in case you are planning on doing a lot of upgrading. If not, that doesn't matter anyway.