Most new apps with P4 optimizations also seem to be optimized for the Athlon as well. Intel has narrowed the performance gap but the Athlon still seems to be able to more than hold its own. I've run a wide variety of shareware and commercial apps on my old SlotA 1GHz Athlon and not seen any incompatibility that I could attribute to the CPU. Since you obviously aren't hung up on having an 'Intel Inside' sticker, I can't see paying the extra money for the Pentium. Truly top of the line would be an Itanium but there is very little 64 bit software at this point.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken