Quote Originally Posted by JeromeGrasdyke
I'd go with an Athlon64; I've been using one in my work machine for the last nine months and the integrated memory controller seems to give it a fair boost over Athlon XP and P4 for playing Rome. And it's probably the best balance of price, performance and future-proofing as well. Decent ram is worth having also - Corsair's low-latency modules are very good, and steer clear of slow memory setups such as PC800 RDRAM if you can. You might be able to (correctly) infer from that Rome really exercises the old memory bandwidth limits
That is very useful to those of us trying to guide folks when they upgrade. I'm still using an old KT266A system with a 9800 Pro...so I suspected memory bandwidth was a key limiter for me, although my XP2400 imposes some as well.

Despite the flare bug that rarely shows its head for me, I've been pleased with the apparent demo stability on this system, despite the fact that it is running 98SE.