The Budget Gaming System II by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson
	Motherboard Monitor can be maintained on your desktop or minimized with the selected items in your system tray. I keep the CPU temperature active in the tray at the bottom right of my desktop. Now let's consider the rest of the components of this system. I chose the Western Digital 8.4 GB drive as a good price/performance compromise. Note that you can also get this drive in the new ATA 66 standard, which will almost double your throughput where the mainboard supports it (Abit's new BE6, for example.) I chose the SONY CD ROM as the best price/performance hardware short of going with a DVD/CD combination or Hi-Vals TrueX (about $95). Reliable and with a good transfer rate, the device is also relatively quiet. The Diamond MX300 uses the A3D standard, arguably superior and more flexible than Creative's EAX extensions (watch for an interview with Aureal in the next week or two.) This board has four speaker support and does DirectSound3d acceleration in hardware for about $55. Click to continue		Finally, it's tough to beat the performance of STB's V3 2000. For a mere $90 you get speed beyond TNT or Voodoo2 and have Glide, D3d and OpenGL support. I clocked my 400A to 6x75 and then 6x83 with nary a blink of an eye. SoftMenuII works as advertised, and you can even select to ignore the boot speed warning so that there is no pause in the boot process and you don't have to hit F1 to bypass the error message. Don't let that message scare you! The CPU only went from an average 27 degrees Celsius to 31 degrees Celsius in my cool 19C (68 degrees F) office. The Cel 400A seems to have plenty of headroom, but be aware that there are a few odd video and sound boards out there that DO NOT like a bus speed beyond 37.5 MHz (half of 75 MHz.) This system FLIES and actual frame rates are very, very high. For about $750 including shipping charges this is an unbeatable system for gaming! I haven't uncovered any compatability issues with any of my current sims or beta releases, and the system is rock stable. Join a discussion forum on this article by clicking   HERE.
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