AMD Athlon II's hit the best budget value price point for SMB's. The biggest reason is cost-for-feature in the CPU.
Windows 7 Pro runs great on those CPU's, and they have the requisite virtualization technology for running XP Mode on Win 7. The best all-around desktop system I found to build was with an Asus motherboard with an AMD 785G chipset motherboard with DDR3 support, and Sideport memory for graphics. A system with that motherboard, either in Full ATX or Micro ATX, a cheap Athlon II, Win 7 Pro, a respectable case with quality power supply (like an Antec New Solution series) and hard drive and DVD burner, will be a very low-priced, but very compatible system for business applications. What's also good is that you can run 64-bit natively on hardware, while your legacy 32-bit XP environment is still available. Make sure it has 4GB of DDR3-1333 (still pretty cheap) and that system will scream through most business apps heartily.
If you're looking for a system for home use on the cheap, substitute Windows 7 Home Premium instead of Pro, and it's a sweet HD multimedia and gaming system (with the Radeon HD 4200 onboard, upgradeable with PCI-e 2.0 x16 slot) on the cheap. AMD even has a free GPU-accelerated video encoder for ATI Radeon's that utilizes ATI Stream GPGPU technology, so you don't have to buy a decent GPGPU encoder like you do for NVIDIA cards.
Sure beats a Pentium dual-core (lacking VT) and Intel GMA graphics any day.
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