Welcome to the March 2001 edition of the Sharky Extreme High-End Business PC Buyer's Guide. We've scoured the price lists, and benchmarked some new hardware to find the right hardware to recommend for your business PC purposes. For those of you returning, you'll see some core changes from last month, especially on the Intel side. We've gone and taken a bit of a economic hit to allow you to extend your system more easily in the future. We didn't jump too much on the AMD side, but the advent of 133MHz front side bus-based Atlons has caused a few alterations. Before we go any further, let's touch on the intention of this guide.

Our definition of "high-end business use" includes tasks where processing power can make a difference to how quickly work gets completed, screen real estate is at a premium, the data is valuable, and crashes can mean lost time and money not to mention a broken mouse and/or printer.

Whether you are a graphic artist, software developer, accountant, web publisher, or work in any profession that needs ample computing power, or if you build a PC for just such professionals, this is the PC system we recommend for your high-end needs. You need something fast, easy to use and of course, it must be reliable. We feel that, if time is money, these recommendations are completely justifiable. Feel free to check back every month as we update this article.

Read on to get our recommendations for a High-End Business PC.

Current Cost: $115 (case + 300W ATX12V power supply)

Palo Alto Products is a pretty prestigious case design company. Unlike the usual case maker, they actually apply some industrial design principals to their cases, making them easier to work in and quieter to boot. The PA-810, our model of choice, can be found online with a 300W power supply for about $115 or can be ordered in volume from a distributor or the manufacturer. Whilst far from being fancy, it does however fit the bill by not being obtrusively large and or noisy.

One note to add, if you decided to go the Intel route, be sure that the power supply your company decides to go with is ATX12V compliant. This power supply has special connectors that are needed for a Pentium 4 based system. The AMD route still warrants a heavy duty 300 Watt power supply, but the ATX12V specification is not necessary.