Entry Level Buyer's Guide, October 2005

Introduction

The school year is now in full swing, and hopefully everyone is enjoying themselves. Some of you might already be in the depths of mid-terms, for which you have our condolences. If you're lucky, you already have a PC that you can use for doing homework, but parents might now find themselves looking towards the purchase of a new or second computer, in order to allow more than one person to access the Internet at the same time. What better way to fill that need than to pick up an economically priced budget PC?

Our last Buyer's Guide looked at the Mid-Range price segment, with a price range of $1250 to $1500. We split the recommendations up into office/business vs. gaming use, and we attempted to utilize the available budget to customize the system as much as possible for the intended market. We'd like to do the same thing for the budget sector, but unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot that can be done past a certain point. We'll give it a shot, though, with the goal of getting as close as possible to $500 for the non-gaming systems and $750 for the gaming configuration. If you want a bit more performance, you can look at the Mid-Range recommendations and try to downgrade some areas. Alternatively, you can take the budget recommendations and upgrade them where necessary. Either way, it should be pretty easy to combine the information from our Buyer's Guides and Price Guides to put together the type of system that you desire.

We'll be including an AMD as well as an Intel configuration for each of the recommendations. Performance and price are competitive in the budget realm, with AMD holding an overall lead at present. However, the lead is more like watching two family sedans drive down a two-lane street, the drivers going about their daily tasks without even realizing that they could be racing each other to the next stop light. If that doesn't make sense, what we're really saying is that for typical family use and basic office tasks, talking about performance really doesn't matter much. If the computer can get the job done and the user doesn't feel that it's too slow, the goal has been achieved. Price is generally a bigger concern than loading a web page one second faster.

Since the last Entry Level Guide, we've had a few changes. Nothing earth-shattering, of course, but we do have the expected price drops as well as a few new components on the market. As usual, we'll start with the selection of an appropriate platform and go from there.