As with our Econobox, we have a few alternative component suggestions for our mid-range build, should you wish to move up or down in price a little bit.
| Component | Item | Price |
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ | $173.99 |
| Motherboard | Abit KN9 SLI | $99.99 |
| Storage | Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB | $119.99 |
Processor
With the advent of the nForce 650i SLI, AMD's advantage in the cheap enthusiast motherboard department has been severely reduced. Still, AMD's recent round of price cuts has kept its CPUs competitive on the value front. For our alternative, we've chosen the Athlon 64 X2 5600+, which we found to offer slightly better value than the Core 2 Duo E6400. The Core 2 Duo will have lower power consumption and likely better overclocking potential, but if you don't overclock and don't particularly care about how many watts you're pulling, this is the chip to get.
Motherboard
Our alternative mobo, the Abit KN9 SLI, is a great little board. Despite a $99.99 price tag, it offers SLI capability, six Serial ATA ports with all kinds of RAID support, dual Gigabit LAN with TCP/IP offloading, and passive chipset cooling that also takes care of the processor's power regulation circuitry. What's more, the KN9 SLI includes Abit's excellent μGuru overclocking, fan monitoring, and fan control features.
Storage
Once again, we're suggesting a Seagate hard drive as an alternative for folks who really want a five-year warranty. Be warned that the Barracuda 7200.10 500GB costs $10 more than the Western Digital drive in our main recommendations, though, and that it should have both lower performance and higher noise levels.
