It's true, that the P4 will have a new socket mid 2001, so if you have a motherboard that accepts either Athlon or P3, I would go that way. You otherwise are doomed to buying the most expensive CPU, Motherboard,and RAM-with no real life performance improvement over the P3 or Athlon- with no possible increase in cpu performance in the future.Of these three, you could only take the Rambus Ram with you to your next machine, and that may not be the Ram choice for socket 478 P4's anyway. (you would likely be limited to motherboards with Intel chopsets, and we all know how great they have been lately)