Last month's edition was almost a non-event, as due to little change in overall prices and few new product announcements, there were few upgrades to be had. This month is better, and we were able to move to a higher speed Pentium 4-2.66 GHz processor on the Intel side, and nab a Radeon 9600 XT for both systems. The Aspire case is not really an upgrade in the true sense, but it will give our value gaming systems some extra visual appeal, and its lower price actually helped with the video card upgrade. This adds up to a pair of "value" gaming machines that really encroach onto the mid-range level in terms of features and performance.
The Intel and AMD configurations are now quite equal in terms of overall performance, and although the Pentium 4-2.66 GHz may have an initial edge, the Athlon XP 2500+ is the overclocking CPU of the season and can yield significant performance gains. The performance features of both systems are decidedly high-end, with dual-channel DDR motherboards, 512-MB of DDR, and a 7200 RPM, 8-MB cache hard drive. Once again, our value gaming systems incorporate a lot of hardware power for a $1K budget, and represent a price-performance advantage over higher-priced configurations.
* 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.
