Current Cost: $653
Months on list: New
Pentium 4 prices are falling, and by the time you get your first bout of spring hay fever, they will have fallen even further. Intel isn't resting on their laurels as of late, especially with AMD starting to churn out 266MHz FSB chips. You can rest assured that Intel will have even faster Pentium 4 models out soon enough. For now, the 1.5GHz chip is the fastest you can buy.
Keep in mind that the Pentium 4 isn't for that sap sitting under a tree with his laptop working on some Excel spreadsheet, oh no. It does however make short work of SSE enhanced 3D games, and your Quake III Arena frame rate will thank you for it later. Your wallet may not be as forgiving, however.
We told you we wouldn't be cutting corners, so we have done away with the two 64MB PC800 RIMMs that came with last month's Pentium 4. We're not saying that the bundle is a bad deal, but with all this power, we want you to be able to upgrade in the future. We could fill all four of the P4T's RIMM slots with 64MB modules, but 128MB RIMMs will give use some room to grow.
Or...
Current Cost: $299
Months on list: New
Last month, we said that the 1.2GHz Athlon T-bird was your best bet for $290, and we were right, for about 3 weeks. It's just the nature of the game. Since our last High-End Guide, a lot has changed. AMD has finally started shipping chips using the 266MHz FSB. At 1.33GHz, the latest T-Bird narrows the gap between the best from AMD and Intel on 3D gaming scores and continues to push ahead on all integer-based tasks.
If you're looking at the bottom dollar, the 1.33GHz T-bird delivers the most bang for your buck and at 266MHz FSB, it actually makes the most of that PC2100 stick we're going to tell you to buy. With all this spring fever it's too easy to get ahead of ourselves, so we'll save our discussion of RAM for a later section.
See our Value Gaming PC CPU recommendation here.
Current Cost: $36
Months on list: New
Let's face it, the coming of spring means more heat for you to contend with. Our Pentium 4 1.5GHz bundle comes with a retail fan and heat sink, but according to our review, the 1.33GHz T-bird runs "hot, hot, hot." It should be about as refreshing as a cool glass of iced tea that the new ThermoEngine heat sink is willing and able to keep your new CPU as cool as it can get.
Matched with a black label Delta fan turning at 7000 RPMs and pushing an amazing 38cfm of air, this combo even bests the PAL6035 and PEP66 heat sinks from Alpha. Now that's saying something. Need even more cooling? You can add a peltier unit and a copper plate paired with an Alpha PAL6035 for about $70. For even the ardent overclocker, the air-cooled ThermoEngine should give you maximum performance.