Here's the deal. I want to upgrade my system, but don't want to spend a great deal of money. I can get either a P4 2.2GHz or a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with motherboard for about the same price. I feel like I'd get a better mobo if I go with the AMD.

But in terms of speed, are these two roughly equal, or does either have an advantage over the other? I'd mostly use it for office apps and web-browsing. However, I do use SPSS under that other OS on occasion. I also do some audio recording, which also entails a fair amount of audio processing, encoding and such.

I read somewhere in rickenbachers mobo thread that you should avoid the nVidia chipset with Linux unless you're skilled enough to mess with stuff. I'm still rather new to Linux, so I'm thinking of going with a Via. I'm actually looking at these two: P4 Combo versus AMD Combo. Which one would you recommend more? There's also an AMD combo with a mobo based on the nVidia chip for about the same price. Just as an aside, I don't have the time right now to devote to learning how to safely overclock my system so I don't intend to do so anytime soon. So please base any opinions on the stock settings...although I wouldn't mind hearing which would be the easiest to work with should I choose to overclock later.

I'm sorry this is such a long post, but I'm interested in hearing what you guys would recommend. I've searched all over Google, but most people reviewing the processors and boards seem to be using Windows. I'd like a more Linux-centered perspective since I use Linux most of the time now. Thanks guys.