Looking for a new CPU and was told by a buddy that I should get at a minumum 1GHz processor or better but with a 100 MHz Bus speed.

This is what he said about it and I have yet to ask for clarification from him:

you need to make sure that the bus speed is 100 and not 133.  If you get one that is a 133 bus speed the mother board will still run it at 100 and the CPU will be running 1/3 slower.

On eBay, I've seen some 2.4GHz with 400MHz for about $100 more than a 1GHz with 100MHz chips and wonder if I can and am better off spending the extra bucks???

Thanks

You need to get a processor to suit your motherboard. You will need to know what socket the motherboard is and as your friend says you will need to know the bus speed. If for example you have a Socket A motherboard for AMD processors you cant go and buy an Intel P4. The relation between CPU speed and Bus speed is a multiplier, eg if you have a 1000MHz processor with a 100MHz bus then it will use a multiplier of 10, if the bus speed of the CPU was 133MHz then the multiplier would be 7.5. Your motherboard may be able to switch from 100 to 133 by either a jumper, dip switch or a setting in the BIOS.

Hood

Thanks.....I'll just get the Celeron processor that he recommends, I was just worried that the 1GHz would just barely be okay for M/3 from reading some other posts here and there...

I've got mine running on a 550MHz Athlon (Mach3, windows 2000) seems to run fine most of the time, just seems a bit slow when you swap from one screen set to another.

So a 1GHz should be ample