Buyer's Guide: Value Systems - August 2001

Value Gaming

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

Processor - AMD Duron 900 - $65
The Duron is perfect for our Value Gaming system since it performs within 5 - 10% of the regular Athlon. If you feel like spending a bit more, you can get a full fledged Athlon 900, but you're main bottleneck will still be your video card at higher resolutions, so we decided that the extra cache really wouldn't help that much in games.

For more information on all Duron processors, read our AMD Duron 900 Review.

Motherboard - EPoX EP-8KHA - $120
VIA's KT266 chipset has had some growing pains, but has finally matured to the point where we feel comfortable recommending it. Thanks to its noticeably lower cost, the KT266 gets the nod over the AMD 760. We've chosen the EPoX EP-8KHA for its combination of stability and price that makes it an excellent value, not to mention the fact that it's a good overclocker as well.

For more information, read our VIA KT266 Chipset Review.

Memory - 256MB Corsair/Crucial/Mushkin CAS2.5 PC2100 DDR SDRAM - $45
With memory as cheap as it is, there's no reason to go for less than 256MB.  For the same reason, there's no reason to bother wasting money on SDR SDRAM at this point in time if you're building a new system.

As for the exact brand of memory, we recommend Corsair, Crucial, or Mushkin modules.  We use them in our test systems and have had absolutely no problems with them.  They are all priced within a few dollars of each other because of the cut throat memory market.

Video card - Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 (Kyro II) - $100
This month, we finally go ahead and make the Kyro II our recommendation for the value gaming system. Nothing else in this price range can touch the Kyro II's performance in most current games. The secret to its success, of course, is its memory bandwidth efficient tile rendering architecture. This is also what allows Kyro II based cards to be so inexpensive. While there are a few manufacturers with Kyro II cards out there, the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 seems to be the best option and is the easiest to find as well.

Of course, as games that take advantage of T&L become more prevalent, the Kyro II's performance advantage may dwindle quickly. For that reason, you may want to consider saving a few bucks and going with a $70 Radeon LE. With a bit of tweaking, the Radeon LE performs identically to a full fledged 32MB DDR Radeon.

Note that the Kyro II and Radeon LE each have some hidden tradeoffs. The Kyro II performance suffers considerably with anisotropic filtering enabled and in DVD playback. On the Radeon LE side of things, ATI's Windows 2000 drivers continue to be problematic, causing performance and stability to suffer. If you're not willing to deal with any of these tradeoffs, consider a GeForce2 MX, although it will perform slower than the other two cards mentioned here.

For more information, see our Kyro II Review and ATI Radeon LE Review.

Monitor - Samsung SyncMaster 950P - $250
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 SOHO system - besides, once you've worked on a monitor this big, there's no going back.

The best deal we could find on a 19" monitor is now the Samsung 950P, which will run you about $250. That's $50 cheaper than our previous pick of the VL950SL from CTX. It's not a a shortneck, however, but it still uses the same 0.26 mm dot pitch tube from Hitachi that seemingly every manufacturer is using right now.

For a bit more, just about every monitor manufacturer is offering a value 19" model that would fit the bill.