The Athlon64 has only been out a short while, and although it's an excellent processor, from all accounts it's not selling as well as it should be. Real volume Althon64 PC sales increases are expected in the early half of 2004 (as chip availability actually increases too), so now's a good chance to net yourself a bargain and get amongst the trend early.
Emagen's Lightspeed FX is a top example of what's to come, with absolutely everything you could possibly want or need in a PC. We asked Emagen to supply us with a beast of a machine (only caveat: base it around an Athlon64 processor), and boy have they responded.

The Lightspeed FX has an Athlon64 FX-51 processor in it - the higher end version of the Athlon64, plus a gig of Corsair TwinX DDR 3200 SDRAM and a 7,200rpm 120GB Maxtor SATA hard drive. These are grunty specs, and on the multimedia side it comes with a Powercolor RADEON 9800XT graphics card with 256MB of SDRAM, a Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS soundcard Decmber 2003, page 56), a Sony DRU510A DVD burner, a 17in TFT with 16ms response time and Creative Inspire 7700 7.1 speaker set. Basically, you can set this up in your lounge and chuck out your hi-fi and DVD setup.

But how does it perform in our benchmarks? Outstandingly, as it turns out. 321 in SYSmark2002 is a phenomenal score, but was easily outdone by the gargantuan 20,715 achieved in 3Dmark2001 SE. That's just simply mind-boggling. As it is you can thrown any task at this system and assured of it being able to handle it without breaking a sweat. The real problem with this machine is trying to find some application that might tax it.
While it's at the top-end of the pricing scale, it's a perfect example of the kind of machine you can buy if you've the money.