Dual AMD with slow RAM or Single P4 with fast RAM?

[Digital Parasite]

I'm trying to decide which hardware to get for me next box. This box will be running DC in the background but it is not being bought for the sole purpose of DC. It will be my main workstation/digital photography/coding/gaming box.

Originally I was thinking of getting a dual Athlon MP board but the CPUs (just now the MP 2600+ was released) are slower than the XP versions, and the motherboards (that I know of) don't support the latest technology (ie: slower DDR RAM, 266MHz bus, 256k L2 cache). Does anyone know of a good MP motherboard that supports USB 2.0, and DDR 333MHz or faster?

My other option is looking at getting a P4 3.x GHZ CPU that would have hyperthreading enabled if I wanted (I know it isn't a true SMP machine) but motherboards for it support the 333MHz DDR RAM, 533MHz bus, 512k L2 cache).

This is also going to be a gaming machine so I want to be able to use the latest graphics card (RADEON 9700 PRO or GeForce FX), and sound card, a number of USB 2.0 devices.

What recommendations do people have? I know a lot of you have dual boards so that is why I am asking. I'm pretty sure that a Dual-Xeon board would be too expensive for me. I'm just afraid that for non-SMP aware applications the slower RAM, slower bus speed and lower L2 cache of the current Athlon MPs will make my system drag...

Thanks,
Jeff.

[MrTRS]

Here is a link to a 2cpu.com posting where they are talking a lot about a Dell dual xeon for a little over $1100.
But when I followed the link to the Dell site I couldn't figure out how they got that price. Maybe you can figure it out.
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32860

[TheOtherPhil]

Originally posted by freeiso
i my self wouldnt mind knowing the answer to that
from a DF point of view


On the current protein (96AA), my dual XP2400's get approx 275K per cpu per day. I think to get near that, you'd need dual 2.8Ghz Xeon's with HT enabled.

Personally, I don't worry too much about the RAM speed as it isn't as important to the AMD's as it is to the P4's. I am currently running 5 dual AMD's and no Intel's.