Buyer's Guide: Value Systems - July 2000

Processor – AMD Duron 700 - $160

As we proved in our review of the Duron, the 700MHz part performs with the best of them when it comes to professional applications. Whether you're building a cheap programming workstation or a sub $2000 OpenGL powerhouse, the Duron is the perfect solution.

For more information on all Duron processors, read our AMD Duron review.

Motherboard – Gigabyte GA-7ZM - $130

Finding motherboards for the Duron is kind of tricky as the only two boards really available are Gigabyte's GA-7ZM and FIC's AZ-11. Since AMD is confident enough in the board to actually be supplying their review systems with the GA-7ZM and since we've had pretty good experiences with the 7ZM in the lab the Gigabyte grabbed our choice for a Duron motherboard.

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For more information, read our Socket-A Motherboard Preview.

Mushkin Budget PC133 w/ Nanya chips

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While we can't point you in the direction of our usual recommendation of 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM due to cost, Mushkin's Budget PC133 SDRAM which we included in our latest PC133 SDRAM Roundup actually makes use of NANYA SDRAM chips which happened to work fairly well as you can see from our roundup.

Since we couldn't find any 256MB modules with the affordable NANYA chips we decided to simply recommend using two 128MB modules.

Video card – ELSA Erazor X SDR GeForce 256 - $150

As long as you don’t need support for anti-aliased lines, the GeForce keeps up with the Quadro in most situations, but at less than one-third the cost.  The key is the powerful GPU that provides the most polygon power available today.  This, of course, makes the GeForce the perfect card for a value professional system. Fill rate isn't as critical for professional applications, so SDR memory is sufficient.

We managed to find the ELSA Erazor X card for around $150 which isn't bad although some users in our Hot Deals Forum have managed to find other brands of SDR GeForce cards for less.

For more information, read our GeForce SDR Roundup and our ELSA Erazor X GeForce 256 Review