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Double Feature

Pentium II-450s are the new speed stars. But Intel's revamped Celeron-333 steals the show, with great performance for as little as $999.

  

Goodbye PII-333?

Without a doubt, the Celeron-333 chip will shake up the budget PC market. Will it make the PII-333 redundant? Intel will continue to make the PII-333 chip, but most people won't want the machines powered by it. Some corporations, on the other hand, buy only Pentium II systems and will continue to do so for simplicity's sake, notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron.

Intel charges system makers $124 more for a PII-333 chip than for a Celeron-333, and this differential will show up in PC prices. Many PC lines, such as the Dell Dimension series, won't include a PII-333 model this fall; vendors will skip from the PII-350 processor to the Celeron-333. Dell may add a PII-333 later, however.

Not all bargain PCs have Intel inside, of course. AMD and Cyrix make their own low-cost CPUs--the K6-2-333 and the M II-333, respectively. And in the past, these have powered systems priced $250 less than comparable Pentium IIs. Because the Celeron-333 threatens AMD's and Cyrix's market shares, these vendors will have to cut their CPU prices; system prices may fall to just below Celeron-333 PC prices.

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