I just finished building my Pentium Pro machine and I am now planning for what my next system should be.

At the moment I have an ABIT KR7A-RAID board, with some Athlon XP+ chip, however I don't know exactly if it has Thorton support. I have been told here it does not, and then other places say it does, and the FSB speeds supported changes everywhere you look, ranging from 100 to 400Mhz, with and without counting DDR, but not being quite specific about that. This machine is intended to be a very venerable system from around the time when Half-Life 2 came out.

So in the event that this board doesn't support Thortons, I am thinking about what else I could do. Perhaps a Cedar Mill or Prescott based P4 system on LGA775? That would have been a much more venerable system in 2004-2005ish, and with PCI-E, would allow me to do something like SLI or Crossfire (something I have never properly done).

I could also do a K8 based machine, but that sort of runs close to my other K8 machine which is an AM2 build with an Athlon 64 X2 in it. It's not really doing anything, lacking a decent GPU, but that thing's a bit too new for me (I think 2006-2007ish)

I like the idea of doing a Pentium 4 machine, maybe even going nuts and doing a pre-cedar mill extreme edition, but cost and availability are other factors I need to take into account as most of this stuff will be bought from somewhere.

I don't want to buy ANOTHER Socket A board, yet pre-LGA775 P4s aren't really in my ballpark. I always like to go a bit nuts with my systems, getting the best hardware for the time.

So this is why I come here. What do you think I should do, any suggestions or ideas? I'm sure I will get all sorts of different answers, but at least explain to me as to why it's a good idea.

If you can find hard evidence that my A-BIT board will support a 3100+ Thorton, send it right along and I will do that as I am sort of trying to use up that board, but if I can't make the system that I want out of it, I will try something else.

Thanks for helping m8s.