Both AMD and Intel systems feature new processors this month, with very competitive performance. If pricing trends remain the same, it looks like we will not be able to include either the Intel Pentium 4 EE (Extreme Edition) or AMD's Athlon FX-51, as both processors are almost double the cost of our present solutions. ATI's Radeon 9800XT has been sitting high and mighty in this guide since its release despite NVIDIA's best efforts to displace it. With a few extra dollars left over this month we opted for a 250GB SATA Western Digital hard drive, and although a RAID array would be nice, it just isn't feasible without a significant impact to the budget and surrounding hardware.
Intel's surprising release of the Pentium 4-3.4GHz suggests that Prescott may not be ready for a while yet. AMD will surely capitalize on this and continue to push their Athlon 64 and Athlon FX chips as much as possible. Both ATI and NVIDIA have been very quiet lately, as the companies get ready to unveil their next generation GPU architectures in the coming month. This year is looking to be a great one, with a number of high profile 3D games set for release, and brand new technologies yet to be unleashed.
Please note that the prices in our guide do not include shipping costs or taxes. The final system price also reflects a "best case" scenario of finding an online vendor that stocks the majority of internal components, or having access to a number of local computer retailers for system quotes and comparison shopping. Also, throughout the compilation of this guide, we have made every attempt to ensure availability and realistic street pricing of the included components.
