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Pentium-200 Fire Sale: 48 Percent Off CPUs

Intel cuts prices across the board, and many PC vendors are quick to follow.

By Yardena Arar, PCWorld   

Some vendors announced their own immediate price cuts. Dell Computer is shaving as much as 15 percent off both its MMX and non-MMX OptiPlex systems, while Gateway 2000 is mirroring Intel%squots reductions across its entire line--most notably taking $200 off its non-MMX Pentium-200 PCs. San Francisco Bay Area superstore chain NCA is advertising a Pentium-200 system (without monitor) for as little as $1099.

Second-quarter reductions had been anticipated as processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Cyrix hit the market and Intel prepares for the May launch of its next-generation Pentium II. Nathan Brookwood, a microprocessor analyst at Dataquest, describes the situation as a blow-out of non-MMX inventory. He notes that although Intel kept non-MMX prices fairly high even following its introduction of MMX technology in late January, %dquotnow they want to get rid of the last of them. If you%squotre looking for a fast machine at an incredible price, 200-MHz non-MMX systems will be rock-bottom.%dquot

Brookwood pointed out that it will be some time before software able to take advantage of MMX technology will become widely available--and once it is, it will likely be backward-compatible with the older chips.

Intel slashed its Pentium-200 CPU prices 48 percent to $257, but a Pentium MMX-200 slipped only 9 percent to $492. Non-MMX Pentium-166 prices dropped 29 percent to $209, and the Pentium MMX-166 was slashed 24 percent to $270--perhaps signaling an early end for this chip%squots life cycle. The price of a 166-MHz Pentium Pro with a 512K secondary cache fell a hefty 34 percent to $412.

Other price cuts were far more modest--in the range of 2 to 7 percent--and the price of a top-of-the-line Pentium Pro-200 processor with a 512K cache remained steady at $1035. Intel also cut prices for most of its mobile Pentium and Pentium-MMX chips between 3 and 8 percent.