News From Inside The Industry

Compaq Evo Line Moves To HP Label; Dell Offers $119 Home Setup

What's the difference between entry-level economy and mainstream performance? Normally we might say something like $1,000 versus $1,500, but Intel's new desktop chipsets make it as simple as 400 versus 533: The company's 845GL sticks to the original Pentium 4 (and new Celeron/1.7) processors' 400MHz front-side bus, while the 845G combines integrated "Extreme Graphics" with support for the latest Pentium 4 chips' 533MHz bus. And it's the latter chipset that Hewlett-Packard and Dell have chosen for compact yet capable new PCs.

HP has celebrated its acquisition of Compaq with three new models for the latter's Evo business desktop line, all offering the 845G's onboard graphics -- with performance equal to a mainstream 32MB graphics card, HP says, four to five times that of Intel's earlier integrated solutions -- as well as high-speed USB 2.0 interfaces and DDR memory.

The conventional, economical Evo D310 Desktop PC starts at $749, while the Evo D510 Desktop offers swappable MultiBay storage technology for CD-ROM, DVD, CD-RW, or a second hard disk. Celeron systems are expected to start at $769, with Pentium 4 models from $899. Finally, the Evo D510 Ultra-Slim Desktop PC (starting at $809 with a Pentium 4) combines MultiBay with flexible MultiPort wireless technology; only one-quarter the size of previous-generation desktops, the ergonomic new Ultra-Slim is even quieter than the original Celeron version.

As for Dell, the direct giant has added two new Dimension desktop models -- the 4500, with Intel's new 845E chipset without integrated graphics, and the 845G-based Dimension 4500S, a space-saving minitower design that mixes "Extreme Graphics" and six USB 2.0 ports with a choice of 1.7GHz Celeron and 1.7GHz through 1.9GHz Pentium 4 processors.