Mooch, here is the exact same advice I gave to my best friend about a sinilar question:
DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING!
Here's the scoop on the CPU story: the Celeron D is probably FASTER than the Pentium you're looking at (depending on how you measure speed, of course).
"Cache" is a form of memory used for temporary storage, that is WAAAY faster then main system RAM. In the case of the Celeron D (if I remember these numbers correctly), you have 256Kbytes of L2 cache, attached directly to the CPU (you can't see it, like you can see your memory sticks). The Pentium 4 you speak of has 1024Kbytes L2 cache, but runs at nearly the same internal clock speed. It isn't really faster than the Celeron.
The P4 also supports EM64T, which is a little trick Intel came up with to allow 64 bit Windows to run on what is still a 32 bit core. If you want to run more than 4 GBB RAM, and use XP 64, and have all kinds of potential problems getting non-64 bit things to work correctly, then after spending probably 3 or 4 times the price of this MOBO and CPU, weeks or even months of aggravation (I conclude you have never built a PC before), and all the while not be able to use Sonar in any way til it's all done, then I would say give it a try.
But I'm bettin' you don't want to go through that. Keep saving your money, and when the need arises, get an entirely new computer or 64 bit operations
"If it ain't a-Broke, don't a-Fix"
-Tony the FIAT mechanic
<edit> I searched for 5 minutes - the CPU alone is $110 - I wouldn't put a $10 MB in MY DAW, Fer Shure! </edit>
post edited by Zlartibartfast - 2005/10/08 10:54:23