Buyer's Guide: Value Systems - September 2000

Value Gaming
The concept behind this system is simple - the best balance of high frame rates and a reasonable price.

Processor – AMD Duron 600 - $70
The Duron is perfect for our Value Gaming system since it performs within 5 - 10% of the regular Athlon. If you feel like overclocking, the Duron 600's that we've tested have run at 900 - 950 MHz by simply boosting the voltage and changing the clock multiplier. Of course, overclocking AMD's Socket-A CPU's, including the Duron, has been the center of much controversy, but it's quite easy with the right motherboard and the correct information. For full details on overclocking the Duron, read our AMD Thunderbird & Duron Overclocking Revealed Article and the "What to look for in a KT133 Motherboard" section of our Socket-A Motherboard Roundup for August 2000.

If you feel like spending about $50 more, you can get a Duron 700 but since you'll be limited by the memory bandwidth of your video card at the higher resolutions we decided that the extra 100MHz wouldn't help that much in games. As far as overclocking goes, the higher rated core seems to make no difference as our Duron 700's also topped out around 900 - 950 MHz.

For more information on all Duron processors, read our AMD Duron review.

Motherboard – ABIT KT7 - $150
We recently looked at as many Socket-A boards as we could get a hold of and one board stood out head and shoulders above the rest - the ABIT KT7-RAID. While that board is a bit expensive for a value system, ABIT still has a solution for everyone, including the budget-conscious. By dropping the "RAID" part of the product name, and the associated RAID features, the KT7 is available for a much more reasonable $150. As we noted in the roundup, the KT7 is the perfect board to overclock with thanks to its completely jumperless Soft Menu III CPU setup.

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The Asus A7V is also an excellent choice that also offers complete overclocking/multiplier control, albeit not in 100% jumperless form.

If you don't plan on overclocking, Gigabyte and Microstar offer solid products that can save you a a bit of money.

Memory – 128MB Nanya or Mushkin Budget PC133 SDRAM - $140

SDRAM prices are on the way up but at the same time you don't want to sacrifice quality since often times cheap generic SDRAM is the cause of a flaky system.

Mushkin Budget PC133 w/ Nanya chips

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While we can't point you in the direction of our usual recommendation of 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM due to cost, Mushkin's Budget PC133 SDRAM which we included in our latest PC133 SDRAM Roundup actually makes use of NANYA SDRAM chips which happened to work fairly well as you can see from our roundup.

Video card – NVIDIA GeForce2 MX - $120
This month, we've moved to an NVIDIA GeForce2 MX based card for our value gaming system. In virtually every situation, the MX performs like the older GeForce 256 SDR, but costs $30-50 less than that older model. The MX does have the advantage of a higher clocked core, and thus greater theoretical fillrate and T&L speeds.

On the overclocking side, the 0.18-micron core of the GeForce2 MX allows for considerable core overclocking, even without a heatsink. However, memory bandwidth is where the bottleneck is, and thus overclocking the memory is the most efficient way to boost the performance of these cards. Read our GeForce2 MX Overclocking Guide for all the details.

GeForce2 MX cards are still just showing up on the market, so we can't recommend any particular model just yet. We've seen prices in the $120 range, with a few vendors dipping as low as $108 on some models. Note that a few GeForce2 MX's are available for even less, but with just 16MB of RAM. With the relatively small price differential, it's simply not worth cutting the memory in half at this point in time.

For more information, see our NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 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.