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AMD is on a roll. Hot on the heels of its speedy 1.1-GHz Athlon chip comes yet another CPU star, the 1.2-GHz Athlon. And what's new goes beyond just the chip: In our tests of the first 1.2-GHz system from Micron, the pairing of a 1.2-GHz Athlon processor with Double Data Rate SDRAM memory proves to be a match made in speedster heaven. It's a great deal, too.

While Intel has been set back by the recall of the 1.13-GHz Pentium III and a delay in the Pentium 4 launch (see "Intel's Sorry Season"), AMD has forged ahead with ever-faster versions of its Athlon chip and a new motherboard chip set that supports DDR SDRAM. Based on SDRAM technology, DDR's evolutionary memory keeps pace with the 1.2-GHz Athlon's new 266-MHz front-side bus (previous Athlons used a 200-MHz bus, while the Pentium III bus maxed out at 133 MHz). DDR competes with Rambus (RDRAM), the next-generation memory that Intel has backed for the past year and that forthcoming Pentium 4 systems will use.

Micronpc.com is one of the first vendors to offer a system based on the DDR-Athlon combination. The $3025 preproduction PC we tested came with a robust configuration: 256MB of DDR SDRAM, a 30GB hard disk, a 19-inch monitor, Windows Me, an NVidia GeForce2 GTS graphics card with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, and Ricoh's new combination 8X DVD-ROM and 12X/10X/32X CD-RW drive with JustLink technology (which Ricoh says cuts down on write errors). Expect similar Athlon-DDR systems from vendors such as IBM and Polywell in the near future. Meanwhile, 1.2-GHz Athlon systems with PC133 SDRAM should be available from vendors like Gateway and HP in November, but were unavailable in time for testing.

Speed Blowout

Judging from the results of our tests, these systems are a heck of a value: The Micron Millennia XP outperformed 1-GHz PIII PCs with SDRAM, yet costs about the same.

The Millennia XP blew away every other desktop system running Windows Me that we've seen, earning a score of 180 on our PC WorldBench 2000 tests. You may be able to save a few bucks and still get that level of performance in a system with a 1.1-GHz Athlon chip: For comparison, we upgraded a shipping 1.1-GHz Athlon computer, boosting its memory to 256MB of SDRAM, and it too scored 180 on our test suite. These results are nearly 8 percent higher than the score achieved by a 1-GHz Athlon PC we tested previously and about 10 percent above the averaged scores of two 1-GHz PIII systems (all tested with 256MB of SDRAM and Windows Me). The majority of users should notice this performance difference.

The 1.2-GHz Athlon system took over as the undisputed champ in additional tests with CPU-intensive applications. Improvements in these tests ranged from a 24 percent performance boost over the 1-GHz PIII systems for Photoshop 5.5 to an impressive 59 percent jump for the MusicMatch encoding test. The 1.2-GHz unit also outpaced our souped-up 1.1-GHz Athlon system on these tests, but by a relatively modest 9 percent.

Time to Buy?

If you're doing complex calculations, multimedia creation, and the like, you'll definitely notice the performance gains that a 1.2-GHz Athlon system delivers. For example, users who rip CDs into MP3 files might benefit from the speed; gamers might too. For most daily tasks, however, the improvements are less significant, and you may be better off buying a system one or two notches below the top and saving some money. But power users should take a close look at these new Athlon systems.

SUMMARY

Micron Millennia Max XP $ 3025 888/719-5031 www.micronpc.com

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