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Advanced Micro Devices has cranked up the speed of its flagship Athlon processor to 1.4 GHz, producing the fastest system yet tested by PCWorld.com. Also new is a 950-MHz budget Duron processor, which extends AMD's lead over chip rival Intel in the low-cost PC market.

Several vendors had systems with the new processors available immediately upon the announcement on Wednesday. Compaq, Polywell, and Xi Computer are selling 1.4-GHz Athlon systems. AMD expects that systems running the fast new CPU will soon be available from other PC manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard, MicronPC, and NEC-CI.

1.4-GHz Polywell Sets Records

A new Polywell unit using the 1.4-GHz Athlon earned a 246 score on PC WorldBench 2000, making it the fastest Windows 2000-based system to date. The $2888 unit boasts a whopping 512MB of 266-MHz DDR SDRAM, two 40GB hard drives linked with a RAID card, and an NVidia GeForce3-based graphics card with 64MB of DDR SDRAM.

The same Polywell system with 256MB of DDR memory will save you about $140 and won't cost you much performance oomph. For example, a similarly configured 1.4-GHz Athlon Xi unit with 256MB still scored an impressive 242 on PC WorldBench 2000. That's 12 percent better than the average score of five similarly configured 1.7-GHz Intel Pentium 4 PCs, and about 8 percent better than the average of four 1.33-GHz Athlon systems.

Polywell gears its system toward budding video editors with an included IEEE-1394 card and Pinnacle's Studio DV software, which let you capture digital video and do basic editing. But this system has the muscle to do much more; users who want to use that power for higher-end video editing will want analog inputs to handle videotapes, and a more robust video-editing package, such as Adobe Premier.

Polywell rounds out its package with both 16X DVD-ROM and 16X/10X/40X CD-RW drives, a 19-inch ViewSonic monitor, a 56-kilobits-per-second modem, 10/100 Ethernet, and Creative PCWorks speakers with a subwoofer. You also get a keyboard with special buttons for Web surfing. The midtower case's interior is uncluttered, with plenty of expansion room.

Chip Races Continue

Intel's Pentium 4 still boasts a faster clock speed, at 1.7 GHz, but even systems running AMD's 1.3-GHz Athlon have posted better PC WorldBench scores. The two chip vendors continue to leapfrog each other with chip announcements and speed jumps. Besides unveiling a 1.7-GHz Pentium in April, Intel recently previewed a 2-GHz Pentium it expects to ship in the third quarter.

Previously, Athlon units topped out at 1.33 GHz while Durons were at 900 MHz. Intel's budget Celerons top out at 850 MHz. AMD also introduced a multiprocessor version of its premiere chip, the Athlon MP, earlier this week.

The new processors, like their predecessors, are compatible with recent AMD motherboards using the Socket A. The 1.4-GHz Athlon processor, with a front-side bus running at 266 MHz or 200 MHz, is priced at $253 in 1000-unit quantities, while the 950-MHz Duron is priced at $122 in quantity. Those prices are at the high end of the range predicted by resellers last week.

(Peter Sayer of the IDG News Service contributed to this report.)

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