i have asus p4pe (with firewire)intel845chip)and its great proc p4 3.2
my advice is to buy the latest asus board of this series and the top p4 at the moment.
a lot of the people/producers in the music scene say that the way
p4 processors do algorhtymic calculations is more adequate to music data processing (besides mac)dont know ...
works for me...
also hdisk ibm7200 is certanly a good buy

a lot of people dont know this site (it help u configure xp in daw environment- essential)
http://www.musicxp.net