April Value Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 8

Price Roundup

AMD Athlon 64 System

Case: Aspire X-Dreamer II (with 350W PSU) - $51
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+ Retail - $219
Cooling: included Retail HSF - $0
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-K8NS - $69
Memory: 1-GB (2x512-MB) Corsair Value PC3200 - $83
Hard Drive: 80GB Western Digital SE (8-MB) PATA - $57
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128-MB (AGP) - $173
Monitor: Envision EFT920 19" FS - $145
Sound Card: 8-Channel Integrated - $0
Speakers: Logitech X-530 6-Piece Speaker System - $50
CD/DVD-ROM: Toshiba SD-R1612 Combo Drive - $31
Communications: Onboard LAN - $0
Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Optical - $15
Keyboard: Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard - $15
Operating System: Windows XP Home - $79

Total: $987

Intel Pentium 4 System

Case: Aspire X-Dreamer II (with 350W PSU) - $51
CPU: Pentium 4 540 (3.2 GHz) Retail - $214
Cooling: included Retail HSF - $0
Motherboard: ASUS P5GPL - $92 (+ $4 24-pin adapter)
Memory: 1-GB (2x512-MB) Corsair Value PC3200 - $83
Hard Drive: 80GB Western Digital SE (8-MB) SATA - $57
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128-MB (PCIe) - $168
Monitor: Envision EFT920 19" FS - $145
Sound Card: 8-Channel Integrated - $0
Speakers: Logitech X-530 6-Piece Speaker System - $50
CD/DVD-ROM: Toshiba SD-R1612 Combo Drive - $31
Communications: Onboard LAN - $0
Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Optical - $15
Keyboard: Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard - $15
Operating System: Windows XP Home - $79

Total: $1,004

Closing Remarks

Over the past few months, the Value Gaming PC Buyer's Guide has undergone an unprecedented series of performance upgrades, with each update bringing a wild array of improvements. Obviously we can't do that on a monthly basis, but even so, there were some noted updates for April. The most important was making use of lower prices and upgrading to a full 1-GB of PC3200, but the move to the ASUS i915PL and Gigabyte nForce3 250 motherboards also helped out as well. Otherwise, it was a nip here and a tuck there, all without really changing the overall performance or price of the systems. Even so, the overall hardware mix is still very impressive, and being able to include a powerful GeForce 6600 GT 128-MB video card is amazing, and really gives the two systems a nice performance boost. The only area we really continued to make slight concessions on was the monitor, as we'd love to dig up an extra $75-$100 to nab a 17" 12ms LCD.

Both the AMD and Intel systems continue to look good for April 2005. Both are serious gaming systems for the class, and it is very surprising what kind of PC you can put together for a cool $1K. The upgrade of 1-GB of PC3200 and the new motherboards is just the cherry on top and we've already got high-performance CPUs, 7200 RPM hard drives, CDR/RW and DVD-ROM capabilities, with the powerful GeForce 6600 GT 128-MB pumping up the game framerates. If overall value is your main goal, these two gaming PCs certainly deliver, and both offer a noticeable price-performance advantage over our higher-priced guide 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.