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The Cyrix M II-300: Pentium II Power for Less

The first PC with Cyrix's power chip measures up to Pentium-300s in performance and features--while costing up to $450 less.

  

Everyone's time is valuable these days. But given the choice, would you be willing to sacrifice 5 seconds every now and then if you could save about $400? We would.

Consider the new CyberMax ValueMax B8 that just landed in the PC World Test Center. It's the first system we have seen that's built around Cyrix's new M II-300 chip. The B8 ran our PC WorldBench 98 suite of business applications as fast as the average Pentium II-300, yet it costs much less.

Packing 64MB of SDRAM, a 512KB secondary cache, a 17-inch monitor, an 8GB hard disk, a 56-kilobits-per-second modem, a 24X­32X CD-ROM drive, wavetable sound, an 8MB Symmetric GliderMax II graphics card, Altec Lansing speakers, and Microsoft Office 97, this maxed-out PC comes in at a mere $1569. That's $390 less than a similarly configured NexStar 208W PII-300 from NexTrend (a comparable second-tier company) and about $450 less than the Gateway GP6S-300 Pentium II-300 with much the same hardware. In fact, when we put these systems through their paces, Gateway's machine finished a lengthy series of operations in Microsoft Word in 178 seconds, a scant 5 seconds faster than the CyberMax. Overall, the CyberMax system posted a WorldBench 98 score of 161, versus 165 for both Gateway's and NexTrend's systems--a difference you'd never notice.

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