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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (17012)	3/4/1998 5:05:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Respond to of 70976

In general, yes that's what I'm saying. A $1000 PC still uses a pretty standard motherboard with pretty standard chipsets. There is frequently some additional level of integration in that the video and sound functionality is built in to the motherboard rather than being on add-in cards. This tends to preclude the latest and greatest stuff and limit upgradability, but the same basic chips need to be in place. Here's a comparison between what I got a couple of years ago for $2000 and an HP Pavilion 3260 which retails for $799 today: My Old Micron HP 3260 Processor: Pentium 166 Pentium MMX 200 Memory: 16MB 32MB Video: Diamond 2000 (64bit) ATI 64 3D on motherboard Video Mem: 2MB 1MB (1MB upgrade for $50) Audio: Soundblaster 16 Soundblaster 16 wavetable w wavetable equivalent on motherboard HDD: Conner 1.6GB Western Digital 2.1GB CD-ROM: 8x 16x USB: Didn't exist Yes Modem: Diamond 28.8 Lucent 56K Speakers: Yes, generic Yes, HP-specific Expansion: 3-4 slots available 1 slot available What this means is that a novice or low-power user can buy a machine very similar (maybe better) to the one which has served me reasonably well for pretty heavy use over a couple of years, and do it for $800. As you can see from the component list the major chips are pretty much going to be the same. There is some savings due to integration on the motherboard, but that is the result of using fewer more complex chips, which is good for equipment makers too. BTW, I should have mentioned in my previous post that I work for HP Home Products Division (purveyor of Pavilion PCs to the world!), but that all my posts on this subject are based on publically available information about our products and the market condition. mg