In the days when Athlon XP's ruled, the best price/performance ratio for a cpu & motherboard seemed to be an XP2500+ (Barton) coupled with an nforce2 motherboard, because the XP2500+ could easily be overclocked to 3200+ speed or greater, providing excellent performance at a reasonable price.
Is there a similar clear winner among all the various flavours of Athlon 64 and chipsets?