The rock-hard stability of entry-level prices has led to far more consistent guide than in the past. Over the last few months, we've noticed this trend continuing, and we can only hope that the rumored Intel CPU price cuts do come through at the end of October. Along with moving to the Western Digital SE 8-MB hard drive, we did manage to get one important upgrade to DDR400 (albeit on the AMD side), which does offer additional performance and overclocking stability. The higher relative pricing on the Intel side does make for some budget issues, especially compared against the incredible Athlon XP 2500+ Barton.
Both the AMD and Intel value systems are powerful, and can more than handle the requisite gaming and work. We have managed to keep the basic performance features consistent with a more high-end configuration, such as including dual-channel DDR motherboards, along with very impressive Athlon XP 2500+ and Pentium 4-2.4 GHz processors. 512-MB of DDR certainly doesn't hurt, and the Radeon 9600 Pro certainly keep pace in 3D games and is fully DirectX 9 compliant. Overall, this is quite a bit of hardware power for the $1K budget, and although AMD does get the nod this month, either system would make a great value option.
* Please note that the prices in our guide do not include shipping costs or taxes. The final system price also reflects a "best case" scenario of finding an online vendor that stocks the majority of internal components, or having access to a number of local computer retailers for system quotes and comparison shopping.
