I built a 1.2 and it is great. overclocked, it beats P4 2.0 in benchmarks (except for Rambus ram...). I have a dual boot 98se and XP pro. 98se is still the OS of choice but if you are buying all new equipment I would go with XP. XP is suppose to run older software (if you click on a program's icon and go to Properties you will see a Compatiblity tab for older OS)...it doesn't always work though. Supposedly, you can use many older drivers if you don't let XP load drivers during setup...I haven't tried it yet...I'm using 98se because of my 8port se midi interface.