What's New in the Top 100

What's New in PCs

For this month's review of new systems, click the links below.

• Top 20 Power Desktops
  
  
• Top 20 Budget Desktops
  
  
• Top 10 Notebook PCs
  
  
• Top 10 Home PCs
  
  

Sequels sell. Why else would we have had Rocky V, 60 Minutes II, and John Glenn back in space? So it's not terribly surprising that Intel gave its newest processor the rather unimaginative name Pentium III. No need to get clever when Pentium is as well-known to consumers as Kleenex and Jell-O. (Hmmm, Kleenex II? Jell-O 2000?) Fortunately for power PC users, Intel puts more creative effort into designing faster chips than into naming its babies. The new 450- and 500-MHz Pentium III chips are faster than their Pentium II predecessors, of course. But are they a better value?

For this month's Top 100 and Top of the News (see "Pentium III Hits 500 MHz!!!"), we looked at six systems fitted with the new Pentium III processor. What struck us first was the high price: $2877 on average for a PIII-500 system, $2650 for a PIII-450. By contrast, the median PII-450 price on this month's Top 20 Power Desktops chart is $2392. So it's a bit surprising that the Pentium III PCs did well enough to make our chart despite their higher cost. In fact, three earned Best Buys.

Though all six PIII-based PCs posted scores high enough to rank in the Top 20, only four appear on this month's chart. That's because two of the six we tested--the Gateway E-4200 450 and the Micron Millennia 450 Max--are so nearly identical to their 500-MHz siblings, it would be redundant to give each a separate chart ranking. The only difference beyond CPU speed: The Micron Millennia 450 Max ships with a 14.4GB hard disk versus a 22GB monster for the Millennia 500 Max.

Speed is a crucial component in the success of the four 500-MHz Pentium III systems we looked at (from CompUSA, Dell, Gateway, and Micron). Among this month's Top 20 Power systems, a typical Pentium II-450­based PC running Windows 98 scored 215 on our PC WorldBench 98 test. The PIII-500 systems averaged 234, a healthy performance boost of about 9 percent. For their part, the Gateway and Micron Pentium III-450 systems both garnered PC WorldBench 98 scores of roughly 219, which amounts to a rather negligible performance advantage over Pentium II-450 machines.

Given the relatively minor speedup in performance, why should you consider one of the PIII-450 systems over a PII-450 PC? The two Pentium III PCs we reviewed have a significant advantage in features: massive hard drives, large monitors, and (in one case) the latest DVD-ROM drive. Excellent features aren't to be found only in the 450-MHz PIII systems, naturally. Three of the PIII-500 systems we looked at have 22GB hard disks. (Just trying to back up your data from a hard drive that big can be a problem.) The Micron Millennia 500 Max carries the latest 6X DVD-ROM drive, and three of the four PIII-500 PCs have 19-inch monitors. So if the price seems to be getting out of reach, you can substitute less-expensive components.

Speed or Price?

The two PCs equipped with the 450-MHz PIII processor cost roughly $200 less than their 500-MHz siblings. In terms of performance, the Micron Millennia 500 Max ran the PC WorldBench 98 test 8 percent faster than the 450 Max, while the Gateway E-4200 500 was 7 percent faster than the E-4200 450. So from a price-for-performance perspective, the internecine competition ends in a draw. It's up to you to decide whether the modest speed gain justifies the extra price.

If you simply must have the fastest PC available, the Pentium III-500 systems bring a lot to the desktop. The Best Buy Micron, Gateway, and Dell PCs registered very similar scores, and they're all solid systems from large, established, direct-to-end-user vendors. Which one to pick depends on your priorities: The two Gateway E-4200 systems are the only standard-configured corporate systems. For example, they ship with network cards and remote management features, while offering more expansion room than either the Micron Millennia 500 Max or the Dell Dimension XPS T500. On the other hand, in our most recent survey, Gateway earned only a fair rating for the quality of its support, a category where Dell and Micron earned higher marks.

A little farther down the chart sits the $2892 CompUSA American Pro 500. It performs a tad slower than the other three PIII-500s, lacks a hard-copy system manual­-though you do get on-screen versions of system documentation-­and falls short of the other vendors in the support category. Nonetheless, this solid business machine will keep you ahead of the obsolescence curve for a while.

Beyond Pentium

The Pentium III isn't the only processor debuting this month. We also got our first peek at four budget PCs equipped with the new Celeron-366 processor and three with the new AMD K6-2-400. The standout is CyberMax's $1499 Enthusiast KII-400R. Equipped with AMD's K6-2-400 processor, this PC from CyberMax's small-office line performs well for a budget system (a PC WorldBench 98 score of 187) and delivers a strong set of features: a 19-inch monitor, a 4.8X DVD-ROM drive, a Zip drive, and an integrated network card.

More New Chips

Notebook users need not feel neglected by this month's bonanza of systems bearing new processors. To address their needs, Intel has released six new chips specifically designed for corporate and consumer portables--and the systems we examined that came equipped with the new technology fared extremely well on both the power and the budget sections of this month's Top 10 Notebook PCs chart.

Part of the reason the new chips run faster is that, unlike on standard Pentium chips, the secondary cache is incorporated within the processor die. We tested five notebooks equipped with one or another of these new processors. The $3134 Gateway Solo 5150LS, which led the way among power systems, has a mobile PII-366 CPU, a 14.1-inch screen, and a PC WorldBench 98 score of 186. On the budget side, we preferred the $2229 Dell Inspiron 3500 C300XT, with its mobile Celeron-300 CPU.

New Names, Same Boxes

NEC has informed us that it will be changing the name of its Direction line to PowerMate VT, effective early in the second quarter of this year. A company spokesperson said that the new line will target the same small-office/home office market as the Direction series did. The older PowerMate ES line will remain unchanged, continuing to focus on the larger corporate market.