The Athlon series don't really have anything like HT, unless you look at the Athlon64's. At which point your into the higher price bracker again. Pentiums do have a advantage performance wise, but they can't match Athlons in terms of price. If your not interested in overclocking i'd look at getting lots of memory and the fastest Athlon, Barton version as its the newest and fastest, you can. As you say the rest you can build up as time and money allow. Remember you can ADD more memory or hard drives, but you have to REPLACE the processor so it pays in the long term to get the best you can afford.