As with our Econobox, we have a few alternative component suggestions for our mid-range build, should you wish to move the system up- or down-market a little.

Processor
The Core 2 Duo E8400's exceptional single- and dual-threaded performance is fine for most users, but we recognize that some may prefer the greater parallelism provided by today's quad-core processors. That's why we've picked Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9300 as our alternative processor recommendation. The Q9300 is a more expensive proposition than the Core 2 Quad Q6600, which also has four cores. However, the Q9300 has a higher clock speed and a 45nm Penryn core that offers improved clock-for-clock performance with lower power consumption. Those perks allow the Q9300 to largely keep up with the E8400 even in single-threaded tasks—a feat the Q6600 can't match.

Graphics
As we mentioned earlier, Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT brings performance comparable to that of the GeForce 8800 GT for a lot less. A greater number of stream processors could allow the 8800 GT to scale more gracefully with future games, but if you don't mind possibly having to pull the upgrade trigger a little earlier, the 9600 GT is an excellent alternative.

Storage
Seagate doesn't yet make a 640GB hard drive that directly competes with the our primary Caviar SE16 recommendation, but you can save a few dollars by opting for a 500GB Barracuda 7200.11. The Barracuda will be slower and louder overall, but it does come with two more years of warranty coverage than the Caviar.