Buyer's Guide: Value Systems - July 2000

Value Gaming

Processor – AMD Duron 600 - $90

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 running at 110MHz FSB remains quite competitive with the Duron 700.

If you feel like spending another $70 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.

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

Motherboard – Gigabyte GA-7ZM - $130

Finding motherboards for the Duron is kind of tricky as the only two boards really available are Gigabyte's GA-7ZM and FIC's AZ-11. Since AMD is confident enough in the board to actually be supplying their review systems with the GA-7ZM and since we've had pretty good experiences with the 7ZM in the lab the Gigabyte grabbed our choice for a Duron motherboard.

For more information, read our Socket-A Motherboard Preview.

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 – ELSA Erazor X SDR GeForce 256 - $150

While we've previously included a DDR GeForce in our value systems, the price difference between an SDR and a DDR GeForce is great enough that we can now recommend going with the SDR GeForce unless you have a little extra cash left over and can afford to go with a DDR solution. If you do happen to have the extra cash we highly recommend going with a DDR board since you get a huge performance increase in 32-bit color situations. We would even recommend going with the DDR GeForce over buying the faster Duron 700 if you're an avid gamer.

We managed to find the ELSA Erazor X card for around $150 which isn't bad although some users in our Hot Deals Forum have managed to find other brands of SDR GeForce cards for less.

For more information, read our GeForce SDR Roundup and our ELSA Erazor X GeForce 256 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.