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, the Athlon 64 X2 4000+ is our alternative processor for the Econobox. It's not as fast overall as the Pentium E2160, nor does its platform offer the same upgrade path. However, the chip is $20 cheaper and a fine budget alternative.

Motherboard
Our alternative mobo for the Econobox is the Asus M2NE-SLI. This board sports a full ATX layout, support for SLI multi-GPU setups (albeit in a x8/x8 lane configuration), and an nForce 500 core logic chipset with two ATA channels, four 300MB/s Serial ATA ports with RAID support, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and passive chipset cooling—quite a repertoire of features for a $90 motherboard.

Graphics
The GeForce 8600 GT is a fine card for light (and even some not-so-light) gaming, but don't expect it to run the latest and greatest games with acceptable frame rates unless you're prepared to make some serious compromises as far as display resolution and image quality options are concerned. If you're a gamer, you'll probably be better off spending an extra $80 or so on AMD's new Radeon HD 3850 graphics card, which is currently the fastest offering in the sub-$200 range. The 3850 won't exactly plow through Crysis, but it will offer much better performance across the board and allow you to play most games at higher resolutions with anisotropic filtering and antialiasing turned up.

Storage
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, Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 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.

Creative now offers a PCI Express X-Fi Xtreme Audio sound card for around $50, and we considered it for our Econobox alternatives. However, the card isn't based on the same audio chip as pricier X-Fis, and it has the worst sound quality ratings of the lot. Releasing stripped-down, low-quality cards under the same brand as high-end models seems to be common practice for Creative. We'll stick with the AV-710 for our alternative.