The preceding selections round out our low-end system, but we've come up with a couple of suggested alternatives, should you wish to tweak the formula a little bit. These alternatives will allow you to step up to better performance for a little bit more money or save a little without too much pain.

Processor
As we said on the previous page, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 3600+ has been discontinued. The next step up, the Athlon 64 X2 4000+, is also a fine budget chip. It may not be as fast as the Pentium E2160 overall, but it is cheaper.

Motherboard
We recommended Asus' M2N4-SLI motherboard for our last Econobox, but it has since been discontinued, so we've now switched to the M2NE-SLI. The two boards are essentially the same, but the M2NE-SLI has a FireWire port and a black PCB. It also sports a full ATX layout and support for Nvidia SLI multi-GPU setups (albeit in a x8/x8 lane configuration), an nForce 500 core logic chipset with two ATA channels, four 300MB/s Serial ATA ports with RAID support, Gigabit Ethernet, and passive chipset cooling.

Storage
Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 320GB hard drive is back in our alternatives list. If you're prepared to spend slightly more for five years of warranty coverage and don't mind having slower performance and higher noise levels than with our primary recommendation, this is the drive for you.

Sound card
The trusty Chaintech AV-710 is back once again, since we reckon some users might want better sound quality than what onboard audio tends to provide. The AV-710 won't give you perfect surround sound or 3D audio acceleration in games, but it does combine a low price tag with the ability to route stereo output through a high-quality Wolfson DAC. This last feat translates into stereo sound quality that's worthy of much more expensive cards and far superior to most onboard audio—perfect for users with decent headphones or stereo speakers.