Can someone give me advice on a Pentium system?

[etecnifibre]

With my research and advice that I've gotten here, it seems that for video rendering, etc, Intel may be the way to go. I am looking at a 2.8Ghz Pentium (533Mhz FSB) and have no idea which motherboard or RAM to go with. I have been an Athlon person, so have no idea really about the different chipsets, etc with the P4's.

I have a Gigabyte board now, and would like to stay with Gigabyte, unless there is an equally good quality board in Asus or MSI. I would like the board to have the following:
At least 533 FSB
Dolby Digital 5.1 or AC-3
5 PCI
AGP 8X
Dual Channel RAM
Network (Not a must)
etc.

Also, which RAM would be good? I will be going with either Corsair or Crucial. Do I get Rambus 1066 or PC 4200? I honestly have no idea what the differences are.

[SaSi]

The best board you can buy these days is Gigabyte's GA-8KNXP. It's a P4 with 400/533/800MHz FSB and can support 266/333/400MHz RAM (and ofcourse dual channel). And if it's not enough, it has 6 *yes* 6 RAM sockets instead of the normal 3 previous generation boards did.

It will happily run with a normal P4/2.88, however it will race along with a hyperthreading 800MHz FSB CPU.

Additionally, it has 2+2 IDE channels plus 4 sockets for SATA disks (12 drives in total), a 10/100/1000 LAN port.

It has audio, but my experience with on-board audio codecs is auful. Not HiFi. A previous generation Sound Blaster will do fine and won't cost too much.

This board is a bit pricey, but is worth it, especially if you want to stack a lot of disks. I've already ordered mine.

Just a step lower, the next best bet is MSI 875P NEO-LSR. Has almost the same processing features but less add-ons.

In my opinion, go for a multithreaded CPU (perhaps the old 3GHz which is dropping in price) and get 2x512MB RAM chips (or at least 1x512MB). Take 400MHz RAM.