The past year brought with it a flurry of tremendous hype from both Intel and AMD, in the battle to snare buyer's dollars. We saw radical improvements in the design of CPUs, along with the fastest price drops this decade. By the end of 1998 it was possible to purchase several high-tech CPUs sporting game accelerating floating point instructions (MMX, 3DNow!) and frequency levels above 300MHz for less than $200.

That type of price/performance value brought the budget minded gamer the ability to purchase a PC that burned through benchmarks and game frame rates, without having to sell a kidney to afford it.

Here are the nominees for best CPU of 1998:

• AMD K6-2 300
• AMD K6-2 350
• AMD K6-2 400
• Intel Celeron 266
• Intel Celeron 300 A
• Intel Pentium 2 333
• Intel Pentium 2 400