Econobox alternatives
We're happy with our primary selections, but not everybody will want a quad-core processor or discrete graphics. Since users' needs will invariably, er, vary, here are some alternatives.

Processor
We've kind of broken our own rules with this one, but the Athlon II X3 435 has already started to show up at some small online retailers, so its appearance at Newegg and other major e-tailers should only be a matter of time. Therefore, we're including it here as a sort of provisional recommendation until it turns up.

As we said before, the Athlon II X4 620's four cores perform great in just about everything except games. You can chalk up comparatively poor gaming performance to the X4 620's 2.6GHz clock speed and the fact that most games don't really take advantage of four cores yet. The Athlon II X3 435 has three cores clocked at 2.9GHz, so it'll perform better in games and any other CPU-intensive app that's not written to exploit four CPU cores. Gamers will probably want to pick up this processor along with our alternative graphics solution.

What about Intel? In this price range, the world's biggest chipmaker only has dual-core Pentium processors to offer, and those don't really tickle our fancy. Not when there are good triple- and quad-core alternatives.

Motherboard
Don't play demanding games? Then why not skip the $130 Radeon and move down to integrated graphics? Gigabyte's GA-MA785GMT-UD2H can accommodate either of our Athlon IIs, and it features AMD's new 785G chipset with its very capable Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics processor. That integrated GPU can handle casual games just fine, and it comes with AMD's latest high-definition video decoding logic. For many users, more graphics horsepower simply isn't required in a PC like the Econobox.

This little MicroATX mobo also happens to have a nice set of features, including external Serial ATA, FireWire, HDMI, and Realtek's ALC889A audio codec, which can do on-the-fly Dolby Digital Live and DTS encoding. The GA-MA785GMT-UD2H is almost identical to the GA-MA785GM-US2H we picked last time, in fact, but it takes DDR3 memory and costs $10 more. Now that DDR2 and DDR3 are at price parity, stepping down just to save 10 bucks doesn't make a whole lot of sense—especially since DDR3's faster data rates should help the board's integrated GPU.

Graphics
Folks who do play state-of-the-art 3D games may want to spring for the new Radeon HD 5770. We saw first-hand that this card pretty much shadows the old Radeon HD 4870 1GB, generally reaching playable frame rates at 1920x1200 with 4X antialiasing. The $30 premium over the 5750 ain't much in the grand scheme of things, but you'll notice the difference at higher resolutions and detail levels.

Why not just get the 4870 1GB for $150 (or less these days)? Several reasons: the 5770 consumes quite a bit less power, generates less noise with the stock cooler, has a shorter circuit board, and has better texture filtering than its predecessor. Also, the 4870 lacks DirectX 11 support.

We chose this Asus incarnation of the 5770 because it uses AMD's very capable (and quiet) stock cooler. We trust Asus to provide competent warranty coverage, too.