Buyer's Guide: Value Systems - June 2000

Value Professional

Processor – AMD Athlon 750 - $250
The KX133 chipset helps the AMD Athlon come close to a Pentium III clock for clock, but if you compare dollar for dollar, the Athlon is the clear winner.  The Athlon 750 is the best bargain out there now on a performance/cost basis, and it is thus our pick for the value professional system.  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.  Last month there was a huge dearth of good KX133 motherboards that were actually available, but times have changed. The ASUS K7V is now available and 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 – 256MB Corsair or Mushkin PC133 SDRAM (2x128MB DIMM’s) – $250
Once again, the amount of memory is a key factor in overall system performance under professional applications, so even our value system gets 256MB.  

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 – Gigabyte GA-GF2560 SDR GeForce - $200
As long as you don’t need support for anti-aliased lines, the GeForce keeps up with the Quadro in most situations, but at less than one-third the cost.  The key is the powerful GPU that provides the most polygon power available today.  This, of course, makes the GeForce the perfect card for a value professional system. Fill rate isn't as critical for professional applications, so SDR memory is sufficient.

The price difference for a DDR card is much smaller than it used to be, so consider a DDR model if you do a significant amount of gaming on the side. For even more T&L power from the GPU, consider a GeForce 2 GTS, which benefits from a higher core clock speed and optimizations of the T&L core.

We went with the Gigabyte as it was the winner of our GeForce SDR Roundup and it is reasonably priced. It's not the easiest SDR GeForce to find, but it is possible. If you can't find it, just go with the best deal on an SDR GeForce that you can find.

For more information, read our GeForce SDR Roundup and our Gigabyte GA-GF2570 Review.

Monitor – iiYama VisionMaster PRO 450 - $650
Using a Mitsubishi Diamondtron NF, the iiYama VisionMaster Pro 450 provides a perfectly flat display surface using the same technology in Sony’s FD Trinitron models, but at a lower cost.  Make sure you can deal with the damper wires that all Trinitron style tubes have.  The VisionMaster PRO 450 is a 19” monitor and it is highly recommended by us at AnandTech and owners alike.  If you’ve got the funds, we highly recommend you go with the 22” VisionMaster PRO 510 for about $1000.

For more information, read our iiYama VisionMaster PRO 450 and VisionMaster PRO 510 Reviews.