I'm building a computer for my parents using an Athlon XP 1700. I know this isn't the top of the line (the 1900 is) but it should still hang with a P4 2 ghz since the XP 1800 beat the P4 3 ghz in almost everything.
The Athlon XP 1700 runs at 1.47 ghz.
: I've seen many benchmarks how it beat out the P4 2.0 . : Plus the AMD can use DDR memory which is better than Rambus.