Dear Pete,
"Trapising through newspaper ads in this Saturday's edition, has a Walmart insert with only AMD machines advertised, one of which is a Athlon XP 1700+."
There are actually [this week or next week] four big PC promotions running in Germany:
- The grocery store chain Lidl offers a PC with Athlon XP 1700+, 256 MB DDR SDRAM, 60 GB harddics from Maxtor, GeForce 2 MX graphics card, 16xDVD and CD burner for DM1999 (about $900), see chip.de
Lidl had a similar Athlon XP-promotion recently. They said that it was the biggest success they ever had with a PC offering.
- The grocery store chain PLUS is going to offer their PC from October again, just at a lower price (now DM1999, about $900). It's the famous Athlon XP 1700+ PC with the nForce chipset. Besides it has 256 MB DDR SDRAM, a 40 GB harddisc (7.200 r/min, from WD), 16xDVD, 16xCD-burner, 56K-modem and (of course) 10/100-MBit-Ethernet on board.
The PC is heavily advertised and you can order it online.
See plus.de
The PC totally dominates their homepage. Oh, and they quote a popular German PC magazine saying that the Athlon XP 1700+ is faster than the P4 2GHz.
- The large department store chain Karstadt offers the Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo 600 with Athlon XP 1800+, 512 MB DDR SDRAM, GeForce2 MX, 40 GB harddisc, 16xDVD, 16x10x32x-CD-Rewriter, 56K-Modem for DM2499 (about $1150).
The PC is also prominently placed on their homepage, see karstadt.de
However, when you click on the picture of the PC you see the remark: "sorry, sold out" ("leider ausverkauft").
- Promarkt, a large chain for electric and electronic devices (TV, video, audio, film, photo, telecommunication, computer) has two computers with AMD processors on the homepage. One with Athlon 1400, and one with Athlon XP 1700+. The latter is actually heavily promoted. It is the HP Pavilion A943 with 256 MB DDR SDRAM and more or less equal components as the other PCs mentioned here (the price is DM1999).
See promarkt.de
Unfortunately, one big grocery store chain is still missing: ALDI, the pioneers of those PC promotions. They are still all Intel. Their last promotion is only a few weeks back. It was a P4 1700 with i845 chipset. Despite very critical reviews in German computer magazines it was a big success. ALDI sold 300 000 of these underperforming PCs within a few days. What a pity that they never look at AMD, but it seems that you can't have it all... ;-)
Peter |
