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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Prophet who wrote (35415)	8/2/1998 12:49:00 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574608

A trip through the Sunday paper ads, A browse through the Sunday paper shows M-II systems well represented as well as K6-2s....The M-IIs are Packard Bells and NECs. NSM must be giving the chips away at cost or less, hoping to tread water until they can get to .25u in house where they might make a little money. Hewlett Packard K6-2s, 266, 300 and 333s are everywhere now. The sad thing is that the 300, and 333 models I played with showed no indication of 100MHz bus or even any kind of 3D accererator card. Opening programs they responded very slow. Probably a slow access time HD to save a few bucks. A peek in the device manager showed the video drivers to be SIS-5597/5598 which would indicate that the video is ON THE motherboard and entry level at best. No pre-installed 3D games either. So essentially HP put a Ferrari engine (K6-2) in a Yugo. Really a shame but I guess they have to cut corners to keep prices down and margins up. Average customer is oblivious to this. The CTX K6-2 boxes offer much better value. At CompUSA, they had HP K6-2-300s and 333s in stock but not on the floor because "they didn't have room on the display counters". CompUSA appears to be in a state of chaos. Crappy looking stores. Best Buy is eating their lunch. IBM and Compaq well represented with K6 and K6-2 machines as well. Other than their initial add campaign, it appears that AMD has dropped off in promoting 3DNOW. Never seems to amaze me, the lack of marketing prowess on some of these high tech companies. AMD should have 3DNOW plastered all over the Learning Channel, Discovery channel, the Disney Channel and anywhere else would-be gamers might be hanging out. Even Cyrix has an add on CNBC. Apparently the Cyrix MediaGX-266 is here because there is a big add for such a system (Packard Bell) as well. Probably still .35 micron though? Celerons are very well represented as well but the number of Pentium II syestems has really dropped off. I guess Intel thinks they know what they are doing, or have to do. Sell junk. I really feel sorry for people who think they are getting value by buying a Celeron in an HP or Compaq box. On of the saddest things is that big outfits like Compaq and HP can make even a Pentium II 400 machine respond like a dog by loading it up with a slow hard drive (usually quantum big foot) and a poor video card. Jim