Buyer's Guide: Value Systems - June 2000

Value Gaming

Processor – AMD Athlon 750 - $250
Although it’s a bit slower than a Pentium III in games on a clock for clock basis, the Athlon holds a significant advantage in price at similar clock speeds, and for that reason, we’ve chosen an Athlon 750 for our value system. That's a boost of 50 MHz for the second month in a row.  Throw in a Golden Fingers device and a good heatsink and the 0.18 micron core of the 750 can overclock to 850 or 900 MHz.

For more information on all Athlon processors, read our Athlon 1GHz Review.

Motherboard – ASUS K7V - $150
If you’re going with an Athlon CPU, the VIA KX133 chipset is clearly the best platform to run it on today.  The ASUS K7V is our pick as the best overall KX133 motherboard. It's a bit pricey at $150, but well worth the added cost.

You can save a few bucks by going with the AOpen AK72 or ABIT KA7, both of which performed very well in the AnandTech lab. Overclockers may want to take a strong look at the ABIT KA7 for its tweaking abilities.

For more information, read our ASUS K7V Review.

Memory – 128MB Mushkin or Corsair PC133 SDRAM - $125
Never underestimate the value of RAM – it needs to be high quality, high speed, and most importantly, you need lots of it.  Not too long ago, 64MB seemed like the maximum amount that you would need, but with prices so low today, 128MB is the real minimum you should accept.

As for the exact brand of memory, we recommend Corsair or Mushkin modules.  We use them in our test systems and have had absolutely no problems with them. 

Video card – Leadtek GeForce 256 DDR Rev. B.  - $240
Even for our value system, we have to go with a GeForce DDR, especially now since the difference in price between SDR and DDR cards is relatively small while the performance difference is huge. Thanks to the recent release of the GeForce 2 GTS, the GeForce DDR is even cheaper.

While the performance of all GeForce DDR cards is within a few percentage points of each other, the Leadtek GeForce 256 DDR Revision B was able to out-distance the other cards in our recent roundup in other areas, namely its excellent cooling without a significant increase in price. Thanks to that cooling, we were able to push our evaluation sample up to 160 MHz core clock – the fastest of any GeForce we’ve tested to date. 

If you’re not overclocking, just go with the best deal on a GeForce DDR that you can find – they’re all clocked the same and most use the same NVIDIA reference design, thus perform within a few percent of each other.

For more information, read our GeForce DDR Roundup and our Leadtek GeForce 256 DDR Rev. B Review.

Monitor – CTX VL950SL - $300
Monitors are one of the few computer components that you can usually hang onto for years to come.  With that in mind, we didn’t want to go with anything smaller than a 19” on our value gaming system – besides, once you’ve gamed on a monitor this big, there’s no going back.

The best deal we could find on a 19” monitor was the CTX VL950SL, which will run you about $300.  It’s a shortneck model that uses the same 0.26 mm dot pitch tube that many of the bigger brands use.  For a bit more, just about every monitor manufacturer is offering a value 19" model that would fit the bill.