Video: 

Video Card: 3D BLASTER ANNIHILATOR 2MX
$110.99

Video is something that's essential for a gaming system, something that will make or break the frame rate regardless of what the processor is doing. A 1GHz processor will saturate whatever video card we have with frames to display, we might as well have one that push a bunch through without hitting the wallet too hard. nVidia seems to be right on top of this value/performance market with it's new GeForce2 MX chip. 

Like the entire GeForce2 family the MX has an incredible feature set and delivers solid performance with great drivers. The MX isn't quite as fast as a GTS, PRO, or ULTRA but it will cost you far far less and for this project that's very important. There's not actually much in the way of competition in this field, the MX easily outperforms all other value chipsets, and is easily cheaper than anything faster. In fact, looking at this price it's hard to justify spending two or three times more for something faster as this will do just nicely for a gaming system.

Now while Creative's site doesn't list this card as being a product, it's apparently something they're coming out with and you can at least find them on iBuyer so they're either in the supply chain, or you can pre-order them. In any case, this is the cheapest MX card out there, and Creative has been around long enough, proven itself with value components enough to not make me question the quality of its parts even with them coming in a few bucks cheaper than the other guys. 

Monitor: Acer 17IN/15.9V 27MM
$163.00

You can pack all the high end stuff in your computer you want, you still end up staring at the screen the entire time. With that said, we're building a value system, means we can't blow too much on a screen... damn. I was thinking about doing this system up without a monitor, but then I started looking at the options and really the outlook isn't so bad. First of all I decided that we really can't have this rig limited to 15 inches for you to look at, gotta be 17.

This works out rather well because 17" appears to be the sweet spot for price, the average if you will, and this Acer monitor isn't questionable in the least considering its price. 1280x1024 is plenty of screen real estate for our desktop, more than enough for gaming, and $163 isn't too much to spend for something like this. It does do only 60Hz at the resolution however, something that might hurt the eyes a bit, but that's the hit you take for a value monitor unfortunately. It's not horrid, it's not great, but it's par for the course at this price point. 

The nice thing is that most people already have monitors they can throw on this system, and if you don't, this one won't kill your retinas.

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