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To: Randy Ellingson who wrote (41013)	2/19/1999 1:12:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 164684

This is a great time to buy a PC. The performance gains of going from a 350 Mhz to a 450 Mhz machine are insignificant for the consumer market, except for gamers. Even in that group, buying a better graphics card and more memory will give better results per dollar than increasing the MHz. My machines are 333 Mhz with 100 Mhz bus - I did not see a dramatic increase in performance in surfing the net and common business applications in upgrading from 200 Mhz machines. Database indexing and updating were improved proportionally. But the benchmarks show that improvement in moving to 450 Mhz with a 100 Mhz bus are not proportional - declining benefit of the relative Mhz speed increase. Eventually systems will migrate to faster bus speeds, for instance AMD plans a 200 Mhz bus. Also in the works are faster IDE drives - Ultra 66 should be out sometime early this year. To take advantage of these new drives you must have a BIOS and motherboard that is equipped to handle them - something that only a few systems have currently. In the meantime, slowness in getting data from the HD or CD and moving data around the system causes idle time of the processor for most applications. The best deals in PCs now is at the 333-400 Mhz range. My next upgrade will likely be to 450 Mhz with Ultra 66 and 200 Mhz bus speed - probably not until the end of the year or early next year. I may buy an Internet server soon. That is likely to be a dual 400 or 450 Mhz unit. Maybe AMD will have their multi-processor uPs out - if they sell for under $2,000 that might be interesting.