Double Feature

The fastest Pentium II chip ever made! Again? Yes, Intel has created a new speed leader, the Pentium II-450. And it flies. The fastest of the four PII-450 machines tested for this article ran 9 percent faster than the average PII-400 on our PC WorldBench 98 tests. Still, that's not a huge change. The big surprise is Intel's other new arrival, the Celeron-333 chip: It runs like a Pentium II-333 but shows up in systems starting at just $999.

Why aren't we more excited about the PII-450 processor? If you buy a PII-450 system now instead of a PII-400, you'll spend $140 to $300 more for a PC that's not much faster on business apps. True, if you regularly do CPU-intensive work like image editing or desktop publishing and want every bit of speed you can get, the PII-450 prices aren't outrageous; the four systems we tested start at $2629. But for most power desktop shoppers, the PII-400s--at an average cost of $2414--make more sense. And PII-350 systems, averaging $2199, are good buys if you're looking for a midrange PC.

Speaking of good buys, Intel has improved on its first generation of low-cost Celeron chips. The earlier 266- and 300-MHz Celeron systems were slow and overpriced. But the new Celeron-333 is a price/performance winner, thanks to its built-in secondary cache, a crucial feature that the original Celerons lacked. Consider this: As recently as last May, before the PII-350 was introduced, the PII-333 was the fastest PC chip ever made; and the new Celeron-333 performs just as well as a PII-333.