Weekly Buyer's Guide: Entry Level System - May 2004

CPU and Motherboard Recommendations

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ OEM (no heatsink)
Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X-X (nForce2 400)
Price: CPU - $52 shipped (OEM). Motherboard - $69 shipped

The AMD Athlon XP 2000+ continues to be AnandTech's runaway favorite for Entry Level Systems month after month. This month is no different. We had originally favored the Athlon XP 1800+, but AMD decided to level its prices off on Athlon XP processors at the 2000+, so it only made sense for us to upgrade our recommendation from an 1800+ to a 2000+ with the negligible price difference. Both the Athlon XP 1800+ and the 2000+ are absolutely identical to each other feature-wise, save for their clock speed; the 2000+ operates at 1.67GHz while the 1800+ operates at 1.53GHz. As we mentioned before, this CPU offers excellent performance in today's business applications and games while being very light on the wallet. $52 is a steal and will satisfy even the cheapest of cheap systems. There aren't many 2000+ processors available in retail, but any old CPU cooler will do. We suggest the Cooler Master DP5-5G11A, which is just $10 shipped from several online vendors, if you like a cheap, but effective, cooling solution. If you're looking for something quieter, we suggest mounting a Panaflo L1A fan to reduce noise. The retail version of AMD's Athlon XP 2000+ is only $5 more, so you may just want to skip purchasing the Cooler Master CPU cooler to save a few dollars. Either decision will suffice.

We suggest that you read up on AnandTech's very own Budget CPU Shootout from last December for detailed information on how your Athlon XP 2000+ might perform. Keep in mind that the 2000+ isn't listed in our benchmark charts there, but you can still get a good idea of how the 2000+ performs by approximating how their siblings performs.

The ASUS A7N8X-X and its older derivatives have been a favorite among the editors here at AnandTech for quite some time, and continue to be a favorite to this day. We have written extensively on ASUS' nForce2 motherboards in the past, namely about their exceptional reliability, feature sets, and excellent price points. The performance that the nForce2 400 chipset brings to the ASUS A7N8X-X is an especially nice bonus considering the price tag, as this is basically the exact same chipset that you'll find in high end Socket A motherboards minus the dual channel DDR memory support that is totally unnecessary for budget user needs. We've had lots of personal experience with this particular ASUS model, and simply put, we love this motherboard to death. And due to the type of chipset used with this motherboard, you will be able to upgrade to the best Athlon XP processors in the future, namely the 400MHz FSB kind.

All in all, we can't think of much that will go wrong with this motherboard, especially considering how mature BIOS support is at this stage in its long life.

Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available on the AMD CPUs and motherboards from many different reputable vendors:



If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.