Pentium II-333s: The Next Hot Deal?

Want an exercise in futility? Try owning a cutting-edge personal computer. With Intel rolling out new chips so often these days, the top-of-the-world feeling you get from buying a PC equipped with the latest processor is more fleeting than fame. Worse, you can get burned if the price of your new system drops through the floor right after you buy it.

Now that new CPUs appear every two or three months, assuming a wait-and-see attitude toward buying a PC is not a bad idea. Take PCs based on Intel's Pentium II-333 chip. Unlike last fall's PII-300 systems, which were out for four months before price cuts moved them into the majority on our charts, the still-new PII-333s are already poised to become the Next Great Deal. At an average price of $2800, PII-333 systems already claim half the spots on our Top 20 Power Desktops chart, only two months after the first one cracked the list (April's $2487 NEC Direction SPL 333). And the release of 350- and 400-MHz power desktops should knock several hundred dollars more off the prices of both PII-333 and PII-300 machines.

We heard the first rumbles of an impending price landslide this month when prices for PII-333 and PII-300 systems from companies like Micro Express and Kingdom dropped by an average of $260. But the cheapest PII-333 PC we've seen so far is the brand-new Tagram Thunderbolt H2630 PII333, at $2199.

Look for our first complete evaluations of shipping PII-350 and PII-400 systems in next month's Top 20 review. Prices on some machines from big vendors such as Dell are expected to start well under $3000, so it's a good bet that PII-350 and PII-400 PCs will quickly push their way toward the top of our power chart.