Here's what we mean. Take a look at the component list that the Cool Athlon 900 comes with out of the box:
Athlon 700 CPU thermally accelerated to 900MHz
MSI MS-6167 Athlon mainboard
KryoTech modified ATX mid-tower case with front mounted temperature display
300w power supply
Buyers will have to add a hard drive, floppy drive, video card, memory, CD-ROM, sound card, modem, monitor, mouse and a keyboard to the Cool Athlon 900 before they attempt to power the system up, and obviously none of those items are included in the default package.
Clearly the Cool Athlon 900 system is meant for a select few: those that demand high speed and have a large enough budget to purchase that speed. An old cliché from auto racing lore applies here: "Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?"
We calculated that, as configured the way that we'd outfit our own Cool Athlon 900, our total price would equal $4,224 before tax.
Sharky Extreme Cool Athlon 900 System
KryoTech Cool Athlon 900 $2,200
Western Digital 18.2GB UDMA/66 HD $230
Guillemot 3D Prophet 32MB GeForce256 AGP4X Card $289
128MB of EMS PC-133 SDRAM $300
Viewsonic P810 21" Monitor $850
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Platinum $175
Pioneer 10X DVD-ROM $90
Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer $70
TEAC 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy drive $20
TOTAL $4,224
Replacing the Cool Athlon 900 system with a standard ATX case and a normal Athlon 700 CPU drops our system's price to approximately $3,024.
So the real question for today is whether or not an additional 200MHz of CPU core speed is worth an extra $1,224 in price.
The answer as you'll see later in our benchmark results is really both yes and no, depending upon the user's needs.