New in the Top 100

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

• Power PCs
  
  
• Midrange PCs
  
  
• Budget PCs
  
  
• Notebook PCs
  
  
• Home PCs
  
  
• Ink Jet Printers
  
  
• Modems
  
  
• 21-Inch Monitors
  
  
• Graphics Boards
  
  

Those who thought that shelling out big bucks for a Pentium III-600 or Athlon-600 machine last November placed them securely at the front of the power-user pack might want to look twice at this month's Top 10 Budget PCs chart. Three new systems with chips that run at 600 MHz or faster (the MicroFlex-600A from Micro-Express, the NuTrend Athlon Force 2, and the Quantex M650) make the budget list.

Intel and AMD's struggle to dominate the chip world has changed the makeup of our Top 10 tables, as CPUs that once stood atop the power chart are now speedy newcomers to the budget category.

We first saw 600-MHz systems on our power chart in November 1999, when it was dominated by 500- and 550-MHz CPUs. Back then a budget system carried a 400- to 466-MHz processor--and we were lucky to see more than 64MB of RAM and a low-speed DVD-ROM drive.

These days, power chart systems arrive with 800 and 850-MHz processors (for example, this month's number nine Sys Performance 850A sports an astonishingly fast Athlon-850 chip). And the new one-gigahertz systems are not far off (look for them on next month's chart).

Budgets Burst With Extras

These blockbuster budget PCs also offer high-end features traditionally seen on midrange and power systems. Take one of this month's budget Best Buys, the Micro Express MicroFlex-600A. It sports an Athlon-600 CPU, 128MB of SDRAM, a whopping 18GB hard drive, an aging but still solid ATI Rage Fury graphics card, and a 6X DVD-ROM drive supported by a hardware MPEG video decoder--and it sells for just $1099. The MicroFlex's score of 134 on PC WorldBench 2000 isn't bad either; in fact, for an Athlon-600 system running Windows 98, it's the highest we've seen.

If space matters more than price, this month's power and midrange machines offer tons of it. Hard drives are monstrous: The smallest on this month's power chart is a hefty 20GB; the smallest on the midrange chart is 10GB. And the largest? The Quantex SM800 offers 40GB of disk space and HP's Vectra VL600 has 30GB. The Sys Performance 850A packs 41GB into two 20.5GB hard drives connected by a RAID card.

We're also seeing more of Iomega's latest removable storage drive, the Zip 250. Both of this month's higher-end Quantex machines--the SM800 and the SM700--offer this removable storage.