Weekly Buyer's Guide: Entry Level System - July 2004
by Evan Lieb on July 7, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Sound Card
There is no need to waste money purchasing a separate sound card with an entry level system, so the obvious choice is going to be the onboard sound that comes with the ASUS A7N8X-X, which we recommended as the motherboard of choice today. Integrated sound onboard the A7N8X-X is courtesy of Realtek's ALC650 codec, which is a standard 6-channel solution that will fit basic Windows, gaming, and music requirements.If you choose ABIT's NF7-S Rev.2, our alternative entry level motherboard this week, you should realize that because this motherboard has an MCP-T South Bridge, you can bypass its onboard DAC by using the optical out port on the I/O panel of your board, giving you much better sound quality basically for free. However, this requires speakers with the appropriate receiver, which we did not recommend for our speakers choice today, but if you feel like spending a few more bucks, it's not a bad way to upgrade to better sound.
Speakers
Recommendation: Creative Labs SBS270 2.0 SpeakersPrice: $20 shipped
Speakers are a basic requirement for any entry level system, but they aren't that important overall. Still, Creative Labs makes a great pair of 2.0 speakers, dubbed the SBS270. These are excellent entry level speakers for users who also want to have at least decent sound quality for video games and music listening. It also comes with a headphone input. There's no subwoofer or anything like that, but it's totally unnecessary unless you're keenly interested in a more powerful listening experience. Overall, they're a very solid pair of speakers with no real alternative worth mentioning.
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.
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Z80 - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
Watch the Hot Deals forum and you can probably shave another $100 off the cost of this system as long as you don't mind hassling with rebates. I agree with Cocophone on using the Shuttle AN35N-Ultra instead of the Asus MB. It's $10 cheaper, supports dual channel memory and overclocks very well. Take that $10 and upgrade from an XP 2000 to an XP 2100, a proven overclocker's CPU.Cocophone - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
For a budget system why should I pick the Asus motherboard over a Shuttle AN35N-Ultra.Neither board has firewire.
I don't think a budget system would be overclocked, so alot of bios setting would not be used. I plan on dropping a 2000XP CPU and either 256 or 512 of ram and run with that.
computerfan - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
I can't wait for the overclocking and SFF guides. I just bought an Antec Aria, but haven't been able to find an amazing microATX mobo. I am very curious what you'd suggest. Something more high end that supports 400/400 MHz fsb dual channel.I'm actually thinking that with the SFF buyers guide, you'll need to make it low/mid range and then have the alternatives be for a high end SFF PC.
Keep up the good work
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
canadianfbiYou read our minds :) We will eventually have a SFF buyer's guide, but we're waiting to build up a few more SFF reviews before introducing it.
Take care,
Anand
canadianfbi - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
I'd like to add a vote for an SFF guide. The SFF system I want to build (with TV-out and possibly TV capture, using it as kind of a video/audio server for a home theater) is too specific to be in a guide I believe, but I'm sure there are plenty of people building SFF systems in general, and a guide would probably be especially helpful here given the relative newness of that area.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
The overclocker's guide is coming, but it won't be published until the end of July. We wanted to get to it sooner but we've got a couple of big motherboard roundups that have to be published first which unfortunately pushed that buyer's guide back to the end of the month.On the bright side, since it'll be published at the end of the month the overclocker's guide will be able to be even more up to date with its recommendations as more parts should be available by then.
Take care,
Anand
lazerasa - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
I vote we need another overclocker system guide ASAP!StormGod - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
I agree that these guides (especially the entry-level) are an excellent addition to AT but there is one very obvious omission from them. Specifically, a lack of actual benchmarking. We all know that AT has these parts being recommended on hand from previous reviews. Why not take the extra time to assemble both the primary and alternative recommended machines and run at least a small battery of benchmarks? Let us see first hand what spending $546 instead of the mid-level price means to real-world performance. At the very least, try it for a month and see what kind of response you get. I suspect that AT readers will overwhelmingly prefer to see actual performance data than to make a pick basically blindly.gimper48 - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
WHERE IS OUR OVERCLOCKER GUIDESU4EA - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link
I built a system based on this guide a few months ago (interestingly enough, barely anything has changed in the guide) and am very happy with it... barring the borked WD harddrive which I had to get changed for a Seagate.
I love these guides btw .. I think Anandtech is doing a terriffic job on them. My only gripe is that we keep hearing about the new guides that will be included once the schedule is finalized etc, but for the past 2 months or so, all we've seen are the high-end, mid-range and entry-level guides.