Still, the times demand careful husbanding of resources, so we're looking to wring as much value as possible out of our investment. Last quarter, for instance, we settled on the Intel E8200 Core2Duo CPU, at $239. It's now dropped to $185. Because the faster E8400 has also been pruned (from $255 to $218), you could well decide that settling for the slower chip is unncessarily niggardly, particularly since the E8200 will later this year become the entry point for Intel's mid-level offerings.
But if you're mildly adventurous, you could take another path, beginning with the motherboard. Our choice of motherboard manufacturer continues to be Gigabyte, and the EP35-DS3 we recommended in March has dropped another $10, to $125. You could go for that, or the EP35-DS3P (down $10 to $165). We tend to take the conservative path, but experienced users could get considerably more bang for the buck with a third alternative. Gigabyte's EP35C-DS3R motherboard sits at $145. The C indicates that it accepts both DDR2 and DDR3 RAM. DDR3 is faster, but at the moment, considerably more expensive. Buying a DDR3-capable board now, however, gives you the option of upgrading performance when the faster RAM becomes mainstream.
And because these modern boards make overclocking - running a CPU at faster clock speeds for free additional performance - simpler and (provided you stay within the flags) safer, you could maximise your investment by pairing an EP35C-DS3R board with an E8200 CPU. There's a guide to the process at tinyurl.com/3dqrqw. Read through all the comments and decide whether your experience is up to the task before jumping in.
That "E" designation of these boards, by the way, stands for energy efficiency. Gigabyte is building its power-saving DES (Dynamic Energy Saving) technology into its mid-range and premium boards, which includes the EP35-DS3.
That means your motherboard won't be contributing quite so much to your power bill from now on. Gigabyte's major rival, Asus, has its own energy-saving technology, but we prefer the Gigabyte version. There's been quite a kerfuffle over that in the past few weeks, with Asus claiming superior performance, Gigabyte accusing Asus of fudging the figures and misleading customers, Asus calling in the defamation lawyers then declaring a truce, with Gigabyte issuing a public apology. None of that diminishes our confidence in Gigabyte's engineering.
Memory prices have continued to fall since March, with a 2GB Kingston kit dropping to $54, compared to $65 last quarter. This time last year, you would have paid $115. If you're
You'll pay only $72 for the 320GB Western Digital SATA drive (16MB cache), which would have set you back $95 last quarter (and $101 a year ago), but if you're interested in digital video, you might think about scaling up to a 500MB drive, which at $95, is not that much more expensive.
The 512MB version of the NVIDIA 8600GT graphics card from Gigabyte was $119 in March, but it's also cheaper this month, at $84.
The Asus SATA DVD-RW drive is slightly cheaper at $35 ($39).
We've adjusted our workhorse PC specifications to take account of current trends. We're no longer including a monitor in the package price, because users seem to be opting for bigger screens these days, and they hang on to them for longer than the life of the PC. We will be looking at the complexities of LCD monitor purchases in the near future, and as with all components, there are monthly recommendations on monitors on the free Bleeding Edge forum.
We've also eliminated the mouse and keyboard from our list, for similar reasons.
But as we did last quarter, we're now specifying a separate power supply with a good case. We like the Cooler Master Extreme 500w power supply ($69), and the same company's CM690 case, at $109.

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 $185 ($239)
• Motherboard: Gigabyte EP35-DS3 $125 ($135)
• RAM: 2GB Kingston $54 ($65)
• HDD: Western Digital 320Gb (16MB) SATA II $72 ($95)
• VGA 512Mb 8600GT Gigabyte $84 ($116)
• Optical: ASUS 20x SATA DVD-RW $35 ($39)
• Case: Cooler Master CM690 $109 ($109)
• PSU: Cooler Master Extreme 500w $69 ($69)
• Assembly $70
• Total $803 ($937)