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New Micron Corporate PCs at $1599 and Up

Additions to business PCs start with Celeron 266s and peak with Pentium II-400s.

By Rex Farrance, PCWorld   

The Ce models employ a 66-MHz system bus and provide an Intel Celeron 266- or 300-MHz CPU or Pentium II-266, 300, or 333. The Cp will have a faster 100-MHz system bus, and you'll be able to buy it with a 333-MHz, 350-MHz, or 400-MHz Pentium II processor.

Both models will include integrated nVidia NV3 2X AGP adapters and built-in PCI 64-voice wavetable sound. All the systems will accept up to 256MB of error-correcting SDRAM and come with Windows NT 4.0 installed. For adding cards and drives, there are two available PCI slots along with a single ISA slot and one available drive bay.

The new corporate models all come with Intel LANDesk Client Manager, and they are ACPI, WFM, and DMI 2.0 compliant--which allows them to be remotely managed, monitored, and upgraded. Along with temperature, voltage, fan-status, and watchdog sensors, you also get "chassis-intrusion" alerts if anyone opens the case. Each PC comes with a 3Com network adapter with Remote Wakeup capability.

Prices Start at $1599
The two entry-level Ce models use Intel Celeron CPUs, which have no internal cache and a 2MB Flash BIOS, 32MB of SDRAM, a 4.3GB hard drive, a 15-inch Micron 500Vx monitor (13.8-inch diagonal viewable area), a 1.44MB floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive capable of reading at speeds up to 32X, a keyboard, and a mouse. The Pentium II models come with a similar base configuration, but--thanks to their internal cache--should be noticeably faster. Prices on the ClientPro Ce start at $1599.

Note: Our early testing (See "Intel's Celeron 266" link at right) indicates that Celeron processors provide unexciting performance, although they are adequate for basic tasks.

For more power-hungry applications, there's the ClientPro Cp with the faster Pentium II chips (in configurations similar to the Ce), starting at $1899.

For buying recommendations on these new desktops, check our Top 100 in upcoming issues. Meanwhile we should be able to give you an online hands-on review soon, complete with performance tests.