New This Month 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
  
  
• Printers
  
  
• Monitors
  
  
• Graphics Boards
  
  
• CD-RW Drives
  
  

Usually regarded as light in both weight and processing power, notebooks are becoming still smaller but also gaining speed. As this month's chart shows, lightweight laptops can now be powerhouse systems. The power notebook chart contains two featherweight travel laptops that more than hold their own in performance: the IBM ThinkPad T20 (with a travel weight of 6.5 pounds) in fourth place, and the Micron TransPort LT (6.1 pounds) in fifth. Both pack significant processing punch into a small package, with Pentium III CPUs running at speeds of 650 MHz or above. Good things can come in small (and light) packages.

CD-RW Drives,Thunderbirds Are Go

The technology behind CD-RW drives is improving apace, which is why we've introduced a new Top 10 review to cover them, expanded from our Top 5 CD-RW Drives reviews. The first drive to claim the top spot is Plextor's new PlexWriter 12/10/32, which, as its name suggests, can write CD-R discs at 12X and CD-RW discs at 10X; it's the first to offer that impressive combination of speeds.

Similarly, AMD's new processor looks likely to impress. The Athlon was called Thunderbird during development, but the company now refers to it loquaciously as the AMD Athlon Processor with Performance-Enhancing Cache Memory. Whatever you call it, it looks like a seriously speedy processor.

One of the first PCs we've tested using the new Athlon lives up to the enhanced name. Polywell's Poly K7-1000A earned a score of 169 on our PC WorldBench 2000 tests--the highest we've seen from a Windows 98 system. However, this Poly just failed to make the chart, primarily because of its $3250 price. A not inconsiderable part of this cost is attributable to the new Athlon chip itself: AMD currently charges $990 for the processor alone.

Previous versions of Athlon sported 512KB of L2 cache located on a separate chip. The new Athlon has only 256KB of L2 cache, but it's integrated into the processor chip itself, speeding up data transfer between the processor and the cache and boosting overall performance.

A second new feature of the enhanced Athlon is its smaller size, says AMD representative Scott Carroll. Because previous Athlons needed both the processor chip and the cache chip, they had to be installed in the larger Slot A. Since the cache is now on the same chip as the processor, the new Athlons can sit flush against the motherboard in the smaller Socket A. "The new AMD Athlons are currently available in Slot A and Socket A form factors to make it easier for computer manufacturers," says Carroll. "AMD's Slot A Athlons will be available for a limited time, and then [the company will] move [completely] to Socket A."

Room With a View

Four new 21-inch monitors enter the Top 10 this month. The CTX PR1400F, the ViewSonic PF815, and the NEC MultiSync FE1250 come in at under $900 but don't forgo image quality: All earned a rating of Good or better for text quality. The CTX PR1400F was particularly impressive, achieving a Very Good text rating for the attractive price of $799 and landing in third place on the chart.