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PII-450 Prices Lower Than You'd Expect

You always have to pay a premium for top-notch power, right? Not this month. The Top 20 charts feature six PCs with Intel's new 450-MHz chip--and not one costs over $3000.

  

A huge influx of new systems marched onto our Top 20 Power Desktops chart this month, all but one of them powered by Intel's new Pentium II-450 processor. While their performance is remarkable--they're about 6 percent faster than an average PII-400 system--their prices are the real surprise. Not one is priced as much as $3000, and the least expensive, Acma's ZPower 6450 PII-450, is only $2395. At last, the annoying pattern of charging exorbitant prices for the latest CPU appears to be dead.

A year ago, a Micron Millennia XKU 300 with the then-new PII-300 chip had a stratospheric price tag of over $4000, and a Gateway G6 300XL with the same CPU was $3799. Both the Micron and Gateway came loaded with high-end graphics and speakers and the latest 19-inch monitors. Meanwhile, PCs with the slightly older PII-266 chip and less eye-opening configurations averaged around $2800.

Today, vendors throw the latest power processor into all kinds of configurations and keep the price as low as possible. Dell's Dimension XPS R400 and R450, for example, both cost $2579, though one's a PII-400 and the other a PII-450. The difference? The slower PC has a 19-inch monitor and 64MB of RAM, while the PII-450 PC has a 17-inch monitor and 128MB of RAM. It comes out nearly a wash on the configurations (and memory is dirt cheap these days). But picking the right PC isn't getting any easier.

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