Send some of your money (you appear to have heaps), by cheque to me.
I'm really poor.
 

 
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i got two cel. 400's and an ABit bp6, you can ovrclk them to 550, the athlons are a good choice, especially the 800's

sorry Felix, this has been a long time coming, and the only reason I can get it now is due to the wonders of VISA
 
yeah, I like both options, but I'll have to do more research before deciding which is best for me.

LM, let me know when you decide, and why you decided that option becuase i need to upgrade this summer and i was thinking about a dual celeron system (then overclock) or maybe a faster single athlon. and, seeing as i'm not made of money, i'll need the setup to last a couple of years until i finsih education and get a decent job.
So it owuld be cool if you could let me know what you decide

I've got an Athlon 800 and to be honest I think it's the best thing I've ever bought. I've owned a variety of other CPU's - Celeron 500, Pentium III 550 and the Atlon has been the most impressive by a long way. Remeber, if you buy a duel Celeron system, you'll miss out on the new SSE instructions of the new processors - the Athlon has a very comprehensive SSE instruction set - 3DNOW which can make a significant impact on games performance for example. Also remember that not every application and game fully supports duel processors and that there have been many posts reporting serious problems with duel processor setups.

sorry - mental block, forgot how to spell dual!!!!!!!!

Thanks Damien, I like the Cels because of the low cost, the prices I've seen, I can get 2 Cel 500s for the same price as 1 Athlon 600. BUT, as you said, the Cels have limitations, and I've spoken to others who have used the Athlons, and they love them as well. Maybe I'll have to wait a couple of weeks and think on this some more.

Complexity brings along incompatibilities and hardships. Dual Celerons will introduce a whole slew of problems and hiccups that, if one isn't prepared for, will frustrate even the most patient.
 
SMP, Overclocking, Win2k, this is a recipe for disaster. Being a BP6 dually, I have to admit sometimes i wish i didn't have to deal with some of my probs. When i built my system I researched to hell. Went through the exact same questions you're going through. unfortunatly, when I did buy athlons wern't in full force and i didn't have the time to wait. If confronted with the decision now, I'd buy a higher speed athlon instead of a lower dual celeron..
 
But i love the fact that I have enough horsepower to last me a while. My system is highly upgradable(dual p3 via powerleap adapter). And the technology is very mature and reliable.
 
Hope this helps.

well, I've pretty much made up my mind, sort of, I'll probably get an Asus K7V with an Athlon 800, but I'm going to wait a month or two first. A new hard drive is more of a concern right now, my 6.4 GB is ready to burst...
thanks for everyone's thoughts