Current Cost: $460
Months on list: 1
Price Change: -$193
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 churning out 266MHz FSB chips. You can rest assured that Intel will have even faster Pentium 4 models out soon enough. The Pentium 4 1.7Ghz is arriving soon, but it's not here yet as of this writing so 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 retail version of this CPU as we do not need the included RIMM's in the package, nor do we want a retail heatsink/fan we want better then that so we are simply getting an OEM CPU and adding on things. Now 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.
Or...
Current Cost: $245
Months on list: 1
Price Change -$54
Well it looks like this month the fastest CPU still from AMD is the 1.33Ghz 266Mhz FSB Athlon T-bird. We've been hearing of course about a 1.4Ghz T-bird but that only runs on a 200Mhz FSB and is not available yet. So for right now the absolute fastest and best T-bird is the 1.33Ghz model. However this month the price has dropped about $50 on the CPU meaning it's an even MORE enticing buy right now! In fact I'm sitting here drooling all over myself just thinking about it!
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.