Decided to see what the latest hot hardware was over at AnandTech, and this suggests it's a good idea to wait for Christmas:

http://[url]http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=1528&p=1[/url]

Summary:  a new chipset coming out within the next two months will offer a significant performance increase over existing ones.

Side note:  Keep in mind that the Intel chips are much slower than the AMD chips at the same "megahertz" clock speed -- Intel realized that most people don't have the technical background to make a comparison past "two is bigger than one-point-five", so they threw out a sluggish design that underperforms AMD's chips by about 20%.

Yeah, MHz per MHz, it would appear that the AMD 1.4 is closer to the P4 1.8-2.0 machines.  

I don't recall a time where there was never a "newer, faster, bigger" machine just on the horizon.  And I don't expect that to change anytime soon.  When the 2GHz machines are commonplace, the 2.5's will be any day now and the 3's will be talked about....actually, the 3.5 Northwoods are already being talked about.

With AMD 1.4's [b]dirt cheap[/b]* right now, I say that's a real winner and [b]now is a fantastic time to buy.[/b]

- Robbie

* about $175 with shipping for CPU and motherboard showing at www.pricewatch.com

Sure, there's always something faster coming out.  But the new chipset appears to provide roughly a 10% to 15% overall performance boost for the same CPU speed.  Take a look at the charts beginning on page 5 of that article.

This isn't merely another incremental change.  The 20% to 30% increased memory bandwidth is more in line with the switch from the old 66MHz SIMM memory up to the PC100/PC133 DIMMs -- a serious performance boost, and well worth a few more weeks if you can put off a purchase.

Prices are dropping anyway -- it's like that DEC slogan from the 1970's:
"buy now before the price goes down again!" [bounce]

BTW, regarding the dirt-cheapest motherboard combos at Pricewatch, skip them and get a good board -- AnandTech's reviews are useful in learning which motherboards run fastest and are easiest to use.  More importantly, the stability difference between el-cheapo and twenty bucks more can be pretty noticeable.  AnandTech's stability tests are a useful start;  at least you know which boards are obviously defective, even if (IMHO) AnandTech doesn't go far enough in testing.  ASUS, ABIT, and IWILL seemed to do the best during the last round.  Have to wait a couple of months for the reviews on the new chipset to come out.