Buyer's Guide - Entry Level, October 2004

CPU and Motherboard: Budget Gaming

Very few applications can stress a processor as much as a game, so we recommend that anyone with an interest in the hobby plan to spend more money. Some might even go so far as to say that the words "budget" and "gaming" do not belong in the same sentence, but we feel that budget gaming is possible - you just have to increase funding by a little. If you can cut down on those fast food trips and eat ramen noodles for a month, you should be able to afford a decent gaming system.

Gaming CPU: AMD Sempron 3100+ 256K 1.8 GHz 400 MHz bus
Price: $120 shipped (Retail)

In order to help you get your gaming fix, we have moved from socket A to socket 754 for our CPU and motherboard recommendation, and the Athlon XP has finally been replaced by the Sempron 3100+. For a price increase of roughly 25% over the Athlon XP 2500+, performance is increased by a similar amount. In addition to the increased performance, the newer socket 754 platform should allow for more upgrades in the future as they become necessary.

Socket 754 was previously the domain of the 64-bit Athlon 64. However, in order to cut costs and avoid cannibalizing sales of their premium processors, AMD has reduced the amount of cache to 256K and disabled the 64-bit extensions. These omissions do not affect performance as much as they might on another platform, though, since the integrated memory controller remains and 64-bit application and operating system support continues to be delayed. Right now, it is difficult to find a gaming processor that can match the price of the Sempron 3100+ while still providing sufficient horsepower to run current and upcoming games well.

Should you wish to gain even more CPU performance, you could always opt for an Athlon 64 2800+ or 3000+. Again, the naming conventions may cause some confusion, but remember that the Sempron competes against the Celeron line of Intel and not the Pentium 4. The 3100+ is equivalent in speed to the Athlon 64 2800+ (1.8 GHz) only without the additional cache and without 64-bit support. Our benchmarks of the processor show that, on average, the 2800+ is about 5% to 10% faster, making the additional 20% increase in price a losing proposition for the budget gamer.

Gaming Motherboard: Chaintech VNF-250
Price: $77 shipped

By moving to socket 754, we increase the price of the motherboard slightly as well, but the feature list is also improved. In addition to sound and network, two SATA connections with RAID 0/1 support are included. Those may not be important features for anyone on a tight budget, but it is difficult to complain about their inclusion when the price and performance are so good. The Chaintech VNF-250 also uses the latest NVIDIA Nforce3-250 chipset, which is currently the top choice for socket 754 and 939 motherboards.

You might notice that the same CPU and motherboard recommended here matches our value overclocking configuration. This is simply one more perk that comes along with the package. We will defer to the Overclocking Guide for those seeking more detail on this subject. Even without overclocking, the performance of the Sempron 3100+ and Chaintech VNF-250 remains very good.