New in the Top 100

AMD's Athlon-600 chip pumps power into the Sys Performance 600A. Pentium III-600 PCs are left inhaling its exhaust.

For this month's reviews of new systems and peripherals, click the links below.

For this month's Top 10 Power PCs, we tested two desktops fueled by Intel's latest screamer, the Pentium III-600. Both systems earned record PC WorldBench 98 scores for PCs running their respective operating systems. But these impressive scores look almost anemic compared to the numbers posted by one AMD Athloninjected machine.

With a PC WorldBench score of 345, the Athlon-600based Sys Technology Performance 600A, running on Windows NT, rips the speed crown away from Intel's reigning PIII system. It's more than 6 percent faster than the NT-based Dell Dimension XPS T600, which turned in a PC WorldBench score of 323. The Quantex SM600 SE also packs a PIII-600, but our test unit came with Windows 98, so we can't compare its PC WorldBench score of 260 head-to-head with the Sys's score. (A PC running Windows NT will score about 17 percent higher on PC WorldBench 98 than the same system operating on Windows 98.) The Dell, Quantex, and Sys machines all nab places on our Top 10 Power PCs chart.

Chips and Clips

A nearly forgotten chip makes a comeback via our Top 10 Home PCs. IDot.com slides in at number five in the budget division with a Cyrix M II-333powered system. Though it's slower than all the other PCs on the chart, at $633, the 333M2 V costs nearly $300 less than the next-cheapest desktop. Meanwhile, the aging Pentium II lives on in the notebook market. Dell's Inspiron A400LT muscles onto the top of the power chart with a PII-400 CPU and a 15-inch screen.

Beyond the processor, PC vendors are racing to be the next to ship an all-in-one box wrapped in transparent blue plastic--and Apple Computer is slapping each of them in turn with a lawsuit accusing each of copying the iMac. Thus far, Apple has sued Future Power and Daewoo, seeking to block sales of their E-Power PC; EMachines, with its EOne; and Sotec, which is also dubbing its iMac look-alike the E-one.

The move toward higher-style systems has not gone unnoticed in the PC World Test Center. Polywell's monolithic matte-silver Poly 500AG400 had us glancing over our shoulder expecting to see Darth Vader. At the other end of the massiveness scale sits Gateway's svelte Profile, which looks like a standard LCD monitor with a keyboard attached. Neither system had the juice to crack our Top 10 charts, but we suspect that before long we'll be raving about systems' style as well as about their substance. Until then, you can read what we think about the Polywell and Gateway at www.pcworld.com/t10pcs.

Another trend you can expect to see in the new millennium is the prevalence of USB, and scanner manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Umax are hedging their customers' bets with dual-interface models. Instead of the traditional single port (parallel, SCSI, or USB), HP's ScanJet 5200Cse, ranked fourth in this month's Top 10 Scanners SOHO category, includes both parallel and USB ports. The ScanJet 6350C, which debuts in second place on the corporate chart, also has both USB and SCSI ports. Likewise, Umax's brand-new 2200 ships with USB and SCSI on the same flatbed. We'll test the 2200 for the December issue.

Cameron Crotty is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. Alan Stafford is a senior editor and Andrew Brandt is an associate editor for PC World. Senior Editor Karen Silver; Senior Associate Editors Cameron Heffernan and Aoife McEvoy; Associate Editors Grace Aquino and Michelle Campanale-Surkan; Staff Editor Mick Lockey; and Assistant Editor Kalai Murugesan contributed to the Top 100 this month. Testing was performed by Ulrike Diehlmann, Robert James, Elliott Kirschling, Jeff Kuta, and Nancy Miller of the PC World Test Center.