With a cool grand burning a hole in our pockets and a PC wish list in hand, we are once again taking a walk down Value Road and seeing what sort of gaming system we can cart back home. As with our other buyer's guides, the SE Value Gaming PC will attempt to combine the best combination of hardware, while still struggling to come in at a price of around $1,000. We look at the performance, features and overall cost of the various system ingredients and then make the call as to the best fit. If you are the type of gamer who looks very closely at the price-performance of any piece of hardware, then this is the guide for you.

Where it starts to get interesting is when concession time rolls around. Would you rather have a blazing-fast Pentium 4-1.8 GHz, if it meant only 64 MB of RAM, a slow-ass video card and bundled speakers? Or maybe a much slower processor would do, along with a GeForce3 and virtually no other high-end components? In our Value Gaming PC Buyer's Guide, we try and cut a swath between these extremes and offer a valid system that provides very good gaming performance in all areas, be it pure framerates, CPU speed or sound output and features. This also doesn't mean we will go cheap on the hardware, or use end-of-line or refurb components for our value PC. The real trick is finding that perfect balance between price and performance, while purchasing quality hardware at the same time.

In this month's installment, we have finally been able to shuffle off the coil of the Intel Pentium III/Celeron architecture and move straight towards the higher-speed Pentium 4. While this may have been considered ludicrous in the RDRAM-only days, the emergence of the i845 SDRAM chipset has helped make it a reality. Due to price decreases by AMD, we have also been able to jack the speed on our Athlon value rig while still keeping the $1K budget intact. This month marks a quantum leap up the performance charts for our value gaming PC, with far more available power than any of our previous recommendations. So stop drooling over the latest GeForce3 Titanium and see what you think of our more budget-oriented systems. We're pretty certain that you will be very happy with the selections and agree that these are two of the best $1K system configurations available.

For our AMD value system, we are sticking with the 7230 line of cases from Enlight. These are nice, high-quality units and you can't beat their $52 price tag. This is also an excellent case to do the initial install on, as well as being a real snap to upgrade. There is also a large amount of internal real estate, and more than enough space for hard drives, CD devices and cooling fans. These features all come in a mid-tower design, which means one less trip to the chiropractor if you're lugging a PC to a LAN party.

Or...

Since we are going with a Pentium 4 for our Intel value box, we also need a Pentium 4 specific case. Although there are far fewer case options than with an AMD system, we have chosen the IN-WIN IW-S508 as our value selection. The vast majority of its features are top notch and the motherboard installation of future upgrades should be handled with ease. The only potential issue is the use of sliding bracket attachments for internal floppy and CD devices, which can be a bit confusing at first. Other than that small caveat, the IN-WIN IW-S508 makes a great home for your Pentium 4 system and definitely won't break the bank.

When choosing any brand of system case, be sure to confirm the Power Supply wattage and ratings before making the purchase. Although both the Enlight and IN-WIN cases ship with certified power supplies, watch out for vendors who may substitute it with an inferior model. The Pentium 4 requires an ATX 2.03-compliant PSU, and if you are thinking of going the AMD route, make absolutely certain that the model is AMD certified for use with the rated speed of your processor.