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Gateway's new Profile 4 PCs are the first machines announced in the industry that feature the fastest Pentium 4 processors from Intel, the company said Tuesday. The six new Gateway PCs also feature a small chassis that hangs below either a 15-inch or 17-inch thin film transistor LCD flat-panel monitor.

The machines, which will sell in various configurations for between $999 and $1,999, fit into the area occupied by a typical 15-inch monitor.

The top of the line Profile XL comes with an Intel 2.66-GHz Pentium 4 processor, which has not been formally announced by the chip maker, but is available for sale on component Web sites. Users can choose processors as fast as the 2.8-GHz Pentium 4--also as of yet unannounced by Intel--on certain machines; that chip runs at the fastest clock speed available from Intel.

Target Market?

The Profile 4 series is targeted at a wide range of users, including businesses, consumers, and the educational market, Gateway says.

The lower-priced machines for either consumers or businesses, the Profile SE and Profile L, come with 1.7-GHz Intel Celeron or 2-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processors, respectively. They also come with 128M bytes of double data rate synchronous dynamic RAM and a 20GB hard drive. The Profile XL features 512MB of DDR SDRAM and a 120GB hard drive.

All the PCs come with either CD-R or CD-RW drives, but only the Profile XL features a DVD-ROM drive. All machines come with six USB 2.0 ports, two on the front of the PC, four in the back. They also feature two IEEE 1394, or FireWire ports.

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