Our processor recommendation is a no-brainer. AMD has been the budget choice ever since the first Duron was released several years back. These days, they're also the performance king with the A64 series. AMD's Athlon XP-based Sempron is currently the best bang for the buck. Socket 754 is a promising and upgrade-friendly platform, but unfortunately it's out of our price range so we'll be sticking with Socket A. The Thoroughbred Sempron 2200+ runs at 1.5Ghz, 333MHz FSB, has a 256K L2 cache, a stock voltage of 1.6V, and is based on the 0.13Micron process. While we're not building this system with overclocking in mind, there's almost certainly some headroom for the more adventurous.