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
We've selected the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ as our alternative for the Econobox. This chip's advantage lies in its lower price, which is a useful trait for folks looking to cut corners wherever possible. We'd expect performance to be comparable to that of the Pentium E2180, since the higher clock-for-clock performance of Intel's Core architecture likely negates the Athlon's 300MHz clock speed advantage.

Motherboard
We found a very affordable motherboard with Nvidia SLI multi-GPU technology support to match our Athlon last time around, but we can no longer find that model in stock. Since the main point of recommending an Athlon 64 X2 processor as an alternative is to cut costs, we've opted for a cheaper mobo with integrated graphics instead: the Asus M2N-VM. This board features a GeForce 7050 "motherboard GPU," which means folks not interested in gaming can bypass a discrete graphics card purchase altogether and cut the Econobox's price to around $375.

The Asus M2N-VM also packs an AM2 socket, a microATX form factor, four 300MB/s Serial ATA ports with RAID capability, Gigabit Ethernet, a PCI Express x16 slot, support for up to 8GB of DDR2-800 RAM, and both DVI and VGA monitor outputs—a very decent feature package for a motherboard priced like this one.

Graphics
Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT may be a low-cost speed demon, but we recognize it may not be quite cheap enough for some. As an alternative, we've selected Biostar's GeForce 8600 GTS. The 8600 GTS is a tad long in the tooth now, so don't expect it to let you play Crysis with the detail turned up. However, it will happily run less demanding games at acceptable settings, and its near-$100 price tag makes it a good value proposition.

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

Sound card
We've gotten rid of the Chaintech AV-710 that starred in so many of our guides, simply due to the fact that it's becoming increasingly difficult to find. In its stead, we're recommending Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer. The XtremeGamer is more expensive (a good deal more, in fact), but as the successor to the older X-Fi XtremeMusic, it features great analog surround sound quality and hardware acceleration in games—two features the AV-710 lacks. Not all games will support hardware acceleration with the X-Fi in Vista, but Creative has a workaround in place for that.

Creative also offers a PCI Express X-Fi Xtreme Audio sound card for around $50, and we considered it as a cheaper alternative to the XtremeGamer. However, the Xtreme Audio isn't based on the same audio chip as pricier X-Fis, and it has the worst sound quality specifications of the lot. Releasing stripped-down, low-quality cards under the same brand as high-end models seems to be common practice for Creative, so we suggest you pay the extra for the proper model.