AMD Duron 750

UnrealTournament makes for an excellent CPU benchmark since it scales so well with faster CPUs. Under UT the Duron is around 7% slower than the original K75 Athlon and 14% slower than the newer Thunderbird.

At 750MHz the Duron is just barely faster than the overclocked Celeron 850 and is only a step away from the K75 Athlon 700. It will take a 900MHz Celeron to beat the new Duron 750, and a Celeron clocked at 950MHz - 1GHz in order to compete with a Duron clocked at 800MHz. Intel's roadmap doesn't call for a Celeron faster than 800MHz until sometime next year, so it will be a while until the Duron is threatened by anything coming out of Intel's labs.

The Duron will most likely end up competing with its replacement from AMD before the Celeron begins to gain ground on it.

Unlike what we saw under Quake III, UnrealTournament is an example of a game that isn't memory bandwidth limited (on the graphics card) at 1024 x 768 x 32. In all actuality, quite a few of the games available today (especially those that aren't based on the Quake III Arena engine) aren't exposing the GeForce2 GTS' memory bandwidth limitations at this resolution.

In cases like this, a balance between CPU power and a fast video card is necessary. The Duron paired up with a GeForce2 MX would probably be the most cost effective solution that would offer an incredible amount of performance for the money. With the Duron priced under $100 for the chip, and the GeForce2 MX setting you back around $120, your motherboard will probably be one of the most expensive parts inside your case.