Go for p4c 3,2G cos it's faster than the prescott. Check the reviews on abit p4 boards, they seem to be picky with ram. Maybe in this case an asus p4p or p4c would be a better choice. (I am personaly an abit fan)
 
BTW why don't you get a faster amd barton cpu and an ati 9800xt.
But I'm sure none of this system will be a "lot" faster than the other. You have a capable motherboard and a fast cpu, what do you think you are going to benefit buying a p4 3,2 or an fx?

Unless you want to overclock a Prescott (and go with a 2.4A then), Stick with the Northwood cores for the P4.
 
On the AMD side of things, I recently got Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe and it's a great, solid board.
 
For Intel, I'm using the Abit IS7-E, but I was also looking at the Asus P4P800 as well. Asus, Abit, and Epox have i865PE boards with a PAT-like hack that gives them the performance of their pricier i875P brothers. I believe that MSI and Gigabyte may have a similar feature as well, but I'm not positive.
 
The 64-bit Athlons are pretty fast in 32-bit, but unless you really have a lot of cash burning a hole in your pocket, you can get some nice Athlon or 2.x P4's for a good price. Of course, if you want the fastest money can buy...

If you're talking about real 3D gaming, like playing Quake or Quake based games such as Medal of Honor, Jedi Knight, or hell, the majority of games out there then the clockspeed of your computer is not the only thing you need to worry about, you need to worry about the speed of your video card as well. It's almost just as important.
 
It just depends on what you are looking to do. Most of the games that come out nowadays use 3D graphics which you will need a good vid card for.
 
As for the whole "I don't want DVD's on my PC, that's what my home entertainment center is for", you can pickup video cards that will play on your TV. You can download movies, music, you name it all via your PC & watch them there as well. This is very convenient for music lovers.

Ok, I finally made a decision. After trying out the ABIT IC7 MAX3 and the P4 3.2, I almost kept this. What a heck of a motherboard!!!!!!! I was pretty happy with this, but what I just read a day ago made me switch. Many of the gaming companies are soon to begin programming or porting over their games to 64 bit. Heck, soon as I got home with the above mentioned setup as well as a brand new copy of Far Cry fresh off the shelf at Best Buy (AWESOME game by the way!!!!!) . . . . right after I put the system together and began to play the game . . . . I read in the back of the manual that they will have a 64 bit beta shortly! But what really put the nail in the coffin for the P4 was another article that says Microsoft's soon to be XP 64 is named the AMD 64 bit XP. And they will NOT reprogram one just for Intel. So, IF Intel wants in on the 64 bit desktop, they might have to come begging to AMD for the code. WHOA! So with all that in mind, looking to the soon to be future, and cause I was really impressed with that ABIT MAX3 setup, I went and bought the ABIT KV8 MAX3 mobo and the AMD 64 3200+. But darn if I did not have a ton of problems!!!!!!! XP was not stable at all! After 2 days of futzing with it and finally trying to reinstall XP (yes, I have a real CD hehehe) which kept failing . . . . I discovered that the brand new GEIL memory I had bought (and WAS working ok in the P4 board ok) was causing the problem. As I still had some cheap Elixer (Nanya it says in CPU-Z) sticks, in they went and here I am (finally) with a nice system. Just need to go back to Fry's tomorrow to exchange the memory for whatever ABIT says in their homepage. But as of this moment, I am a happy camper.
 
Oh, and I have the ATi 9700 PRO. It WAS the hot card not too long ago LOL

By the time the os, games and programs will use 64 bit, and be faster than in 32bit mode everybody will have 64bit cpus.
 
Not even linux makes good use out of 64bit.

I'd keep the 9700Pro. You won't gain anything by going to the 9800s.
 

Hah! This is the true story i have learnt. I wish i had more money, if you had the money, this IS the way to go. I'm not sure what the technology is like elsewhere but i heear that here in Australia we get things among the first in the world. I couldnt be bothered going on about it, but if you want a HIGH END SUPER COMPUTER you could go for a P4 (whatever is best, im not too big on Intel) as long as it supports Quad-Pumping and duel channel DDR ram, or duel-channel RAMBUS if you can find it. Personally, i'd rather go an AMD Barton-core system with a double-pumped bus system, duel channel DDR - that means the sacred nForce2 Ultra chipset (northbridge AND southbridge). For video, i'd go GeForce simply because of the overall power of the integrated nVidia system. Mind my language but f*** radeons, you will have a lot of trouble with them in the future - they may be a fraction faster than GeForce, but what's the use for an extra few hundred dollars? Go GeForce FX 5900 - the 5900XT TD goes for $300, and with 16 textures per pixel and a hardware mpeg decoder, who could go wrong?

For Athlons, the dual-channel memory doesn't amount to a huge performance increase, only like 3-5%. The FX cards aren't bad, but the main thing against them is the craptacular implementation of DX9. Plus, with a 9700 Pro, you're a fool to go to anything else since it won't render a performance boost to make up for the cost.
A few years ago, I'd agree with you on the Radeon series sucking, but the main issue with them---namely the drivers---have long since been dealt with. Also, nVidia seems to like to tweak their drivers to make their 3Dmark score give higher results (to be fair, ATi pulled a similar stunt awhile back).

Ok, I finally made a decision, and was it a hard one. I went with the ABIT KV8 MAX3 mobo and the AMD 64bit 3200+. But then I had a ton of problems with everything unstable for about a week. Went through Geil Ultra PC3200 matched memory (even though its not a dual system), then Corsair TwinX PC3200, but nothing was stable - except some cheal Elixer PC3200 I had from a computer show. But still the system was sloooooow and often unstable. What happened, but not sure which was the culprit, was I exchanged the mobo for the same one (but wow! got ver 1.2 now instead of the 1.1) and replaced my Antec 350w PS with a KingWin 450w PS all at the same time. Now the system is rock solid (and WITHOUT a reformat or clean reinstall). So basically I now have:
 
ABIT KV8 MAX3 (BIOS 2.0)
AMD 64bit 3200+
1 GIG Corsair TwinX PC3200 (2x512)
ATi 9700 PRO
CL Audigy 2
250 GIG Maxtor SATA (8m buffer and 7200 - no raid)
(2) ATA100 HD's
CL 52x CD
Sony CDR
Sony DVD
KingWin 450w PS