looking at buying an entry level box as an upgrade

AnandTech: Entry Level Buyer's Guide, July 2005
A great review of inexpensive computers, that perform well. I think we've gotten to the point where only developers need bleeding edge anymore. A whole computer and monitor for $600 is great! The units include a Samsung CRT which I've seen their monitors before, including buying 3 755DF's a while back. If you drop the monitor and use your existing display these are even cheaper.

Priced just over $600, the performance of our base recommendations is nothing to sneeze at - in most applications, either one will match up well against the $1000 to $1500 PCs of 18 months ago. While we would normally give the edge in gaming to AMD systems and a slight edge in encoding applications to Intel, these two systems are going to be extremely close in performance and it's hard to say that one is really better than the other. With a better graphics card, the Sempron would probably outperform the Celeron D, but the 6200TC is going to limit both CPUs. For overclocking performance, we'd have to give the Intel system the edge, simply because the 533FSB will allow a lot of headroom on any decent motherboard. The maximum 8X CPU multiplier of the Sempron 2800+ is going to make overclocking rather difficult with the current selection of socket 754 boards.