Techiton

If your dusty 5+ year old desktops have unexpectedly stopped booting one fine day and all your efforts to bring it up have gone in vain, leaving you to conclude that either the motherboard or the CPU is dead. Then finding an old Intel P4 CPU and a motherboard in 2010 is not the wise thing to do.

If you are looking for a cheap minimum replacement for that old dead machine or just want to build the cheapest desktop that servers as powerful system for basic gaming (not just the bejeweled kind), office usage, software development and well basically everything that your old single core Intel P4 or AMD Athlon could do, the AMD X2 240 can do more than twice as better.

The Athlon II X2 240 is the cheapest dual core processor available today that is DDR3 capable which means your cheap desktop is future-proof, but you will need a DDR3 motherboard and DDR3 RAM to go with this setup. A good cheap and solid motherboard to couple with X2 240 is GIGABYTE MA785GT-UD3H which has ATI HD4200 - one of the most powerful onboard graphics available. Atleast 2 Gigabytes of DDR3 RAM with the motherboard and CPU will not cost more than $US150

AMD X2 240 Specifications:
Speed: 2.80 GHz
Cores: 2
Cache Size: 2 x 1 MB L2 Cache
Memory controller: DDR3 1066 MHz
Power TDP: 65 W
Socket: AM3
Price: US$60

The 1M Super PI Results: (28.14 seconds)

X2 240 CPU-z: