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
The Athlon X2 4800+ is our processor alternative for the Econobox. This chip ought to be a little faster than the Pentium E2180 in our recommended system, but the socket's upgrade path is considerably less appealing, demoting the otherwise-attractive 4800+ to our secondary choice.

Motherboard
The Athlon X2 4800+ won't plug into our primary system's LGA775 socket, so we've selected a matching motherboard based on AMD's new 780G integrated graphics chipset. The 780G is blessed with a surprisingly competent Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics processor, which can run fairly recent games as long as you can live with lower resolutions and detail levels. Cinephiles will be glad to know that the Radeon HD 3200 can accelerate high-definition video decoding to facilitate buttery-smooth Blu-ray playback.

We have plenty of experience with Gigabyte's GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard, which we featured in our initial review of the 780G, so we're confident that it's a good match for our Econobox alternatives. The S2H also has more positive Newegg user reviews than any other 780G board.

Graphics
The GeForce 9600 GT is the undisputed the king of the hill around the $150 mark, but some folks may prefer a Radeon HD 3850. The 3850 is a little slower than the 9600 GT, but it also consumes less power and comes with an AMD driver control panel that some users prefer. With an asking price $6 lower than our recommended 9600 GT, Asus' EAH3850/G/HTDI/512M fits the bill as a cheaper alternative to the GeForce.

Storage
If you're willing to live with lower performance and higher noise levels to get five years of warranty coverage, Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 320GB is the drive for you.

Sound card
We've supplanted Creative's X-Fi XtremeGamer with Asus' new Xonar DX throughout this guide. If you've read our Xonar DX review, the reasons should be obvious. Compared to the X-Fi, the Xonar offers superior sound quality, useful features like real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding, and a PCI Express x1 interface. It also does a nice job of emulating Creative's EAX 5.0 positional audio effects, ensuring compatibility with a broad range of games.