Thanks for all the advice. I'll be running in 32bit single processor mode anyway, I
figure I'll go with a fast single CPU at the moment rather than get into the SMP side
of things, but get a mother board that can support multi core CPU's as and when they
get cheap and I feel confident the s/w will run OK. As far as graphics cards are
concerned, many of the mb's don't even seem to have and AGP slot on them - PCI
express only. And it doesn't sound like the old matrox cards will fit in the new AGP
slots anyway. I think I'll get a card rather than O/B graphics for flexibility. Really
fancy that 8 opteron box but well ... my bank manager and I had seem to have different
idea's about fiscal policy.
As far as SATA II is concerned, I thought it would have an advantage for many high bit
rate tracks. But the spin speeds and seek times don't seem to have changed much in the
last few years so I guess the bottleneck has moved to the mechanics rather than the
interface ?
Thanks again,
Bruce.