July Value Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 8

Price Roundup

AMD Athlon 64 System

Case: Aspire X-Dreamer II (with 350W/420W PSU) - $56
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+ Retail - $215
Cooling: included Retail HSF - $0
Motherboard: MSI K8N NEO3-F - $75 (+ $4 24-pin adapter)
Memory: 1-GB Corsair Value PC3200 - $93
Hard Drive: 80GB Western Digital SE (8-MB) SATA - $59
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128-MB (PCIe) - $163
Monitor: Envision EFT920 19" FS - $141
Sound Card: 8-Channel Integrated - $0
Speakers: Logitech X-530 6-Piece Speaker System - $53
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 - $75

Total: $995

Intel Pentium 4 System

Case: Aspire X-Dreamer II (with 350W/420W PSU) - $56
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 - $59
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128-MB (PCIe) - $163
Monitor: Envision EFT920 19" FS - $141
Sound Card: 8-Channel Integrated - $0
Speakers: Logitech X-530 6-Piece Speaker System - $53
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 - $75

Total: $1,001

Closing Remarks

The Value Guides of 2005 have held some very serious upgrades, both in terms of performance and features, but this has also placed the AMD and Intel configurations on somewhat of a pedestal, making them tough to upgrade in any significant way. Even so, we managed to slide a few upgrades into the July edition, most notably the nForce4 PCI Express motherboard, GeForce 6600GT 128-MB PCIe card, and 1-GB PC3200 DDR module on the AMD side, while the Intel system remained pretty well unchanged. It may follow this format in the coming months, as it looks like a processor upgrade may be long time off for AMD, with an Intel CPU upgrade being far more likely. In terms of future upgrades, we'd like to move to a larger hard drive, one 120-GB or higher, as 80-GB is getting smaller and smaller as time goes by. We'd also just love to dig up an extra $75-$100 to nab a 17" 8ms-12ms 17" LCD.

Both the AMD and Intel systems are looking pretty good for July 2005, and these are serious gaming systems for the class. As always, it is very surprising what kind of PC you can put together for a cool $1K. The AMD system upgrade to a PCI Express motherboard and video card was more of a future-proofing deal, but we're still looking at high-performance systems complete with blazing-fast CPUs, 7200 RPM hard drives, CDR/RW and DVD-ROM capabilities, and a powerful GeForce 6600 GT 128-MB PCIe pumping out the game framerates. If overall value is your main goal, these AMD and Intel 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.