Baseline PCs

| SPECIAL TO GCNAt first glance, the 600- or 800-MHz Pentium III PCs that are plentiful in today's market look fast and powerful enough to run the standard office applications used in most government offices. And they are'for now.But PC manufacturers are hustling to load their machines with Intel Corp. or Advanced Micro Devices Inc. CPUs that go beyond the 1-GHz speed range. Why settle for a Chevy when you can buy a Cadillac for a few dollars more?In visits to about 75 PC vendor Web sites, I confirmed that the definition of a baseline PC'one with enough muscle to stick around for three or four years'has changed almost overnight. Yesterday you would consider a machine running at 500 MHz or 650 MHz to be built for the long haul. Now, we're talking at or near 1 GHz.But 1 GHz isn't even a barrier anymore'there are faster Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon Thunderbird processors around. If you're looking for a solid workhorse that will keep you happy for years, I recommend a PC loaded with a 900-MHz Athlon or a 933- or 1-GHz Pentium III. There is plenty of bang for the buck in this range.I used the online configuration sites of PC vendors to build some baseline PCs using 933-MHz or 1-GHz Pentium III processors. Comparable AMD Athlon processors would be equally suitable. First, I developed a set of criteria for comparing prices of baseline PCs.You can add a lot more to any baseline system, including faster and larger hard drives, Iomega Corp. Zip drives, scanners, bigger monitors and more memory. But the above criteria will get you started.Don't let processor speed or the base price of a PC serve as your only guides to buying. The vendor Web sites listed in the accompanying chart provide vastly different configuration options, so no two machines listed are the same and the quality of the options can vary greatly. Also, if you don't require a monitor, operating system or productivity software with your purchase, you can easily save $400 or more from what I have listed.My recommendations for each option follow. For now, stick with the venerable Pentium III. Intel intends to kill off the Pentium III in all but its notebook and server series in favor of its fast new Pentium 4 line, but it won't happen overnight. And because the Pentium 4 is designed for Internet audio and video, image processing, video content creation, speech, 3-D computer-aided design and high-end multitasking projects, general office users won't require its power and speed for years to come.Any Athlon processor in the 800-MHz to 900-MHz range is as good a choice as the Pentium III. The latest Athlon iteration processes at speeds of 1.33 GHz, but this is still overkill for typical office applications.Intel's Celeron and AMD's Duron processors represent scaled-down versions of the Pentium and Athlon and are barely adequate for heavy processing requirements. You should have a minimum of 128M of synchronous dynamic RAM. With today's PC cases, it's very easy and quite inexpensive to add more SDRAM.Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) and dual-data-rate SDRAM (DDR-SDRAM) are two new competing memory standards that greatly increase memory speeds from the 133-MHz bus limit of SDRAM to twice that in the case of DDR-SDRAM. RDRAM is now paired mainly with high-end Pentium 4 systems, and DDR-SDRAM is used with some Athlon systems. There are several factors to consider when choosing a hard drive, primarily rotation speeds and interface types. Rotation speed is an indication of how fast the drive's disk spins and how fast data on the disk can be accessed. A typical midrange PC hard drive spins at 5,400 rpm. Drives that work at 7,200 rpm and 1,000 rpm are slightly more expensive and you can easily substitute them for an older drive when you're ready to upgrade.It's important to select a good interface, typically a variation of IDE such as Enhanced IDE or SCSI. Look for an Ultra DMA/33 or Ultra DMA/66 drive for the fastest transfer speeds. A 56-Kbps modem is standard for basic dial-up communications, including Internet and e-mail services. Just about any PC you buy will include a 1.44M floppy drive and a CD-ROM drive. For a slight increase in price, you can get a DVD-ROM drive, which can handle both CD-ROM and higher-capacity DVD disks. Or, you can swap out your old CD-ROM for a CD-RW'read and rewrite'drive when you want to rewrite data to 650M disks. Network connectivity can hardly be considered a luxury in today's office settings. I opted to include a 10/100 Ethernet card with each baseline PC I built in cyberspace. For typical office applications, a graphics or video card with 8M or 16M of SDRAM is more than adequate. When the time comes for more advanced graphics work, users can opt for a top-of-the-line graphics accelerator such as the NVidia 32M GeForce from NVivia Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. Wraparound stereo sound isn't usually much of a concern among office users. Take the sound card and speaker system that is bundled with the system and upgrade later if you want to. I recommend Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional as the operating system in the typical office setting. A version of it can be bundled with your system, usually for far less money than for the retail version. My choice of office productivity software is Microsoft Office 2000 SBE, for Small Business Edition. This generally is offered as an option by most vendors and contains all the basic productivity tools that most office users require. A 17-inch color monitor is the standard for users who have to spend most of their workdays staring at a screen. Vendors will provide anything from a basic 15-inch monitor to a 20-inch flat screen display. Your best bet: a 17-inch model with 1,200- by 1,064-pixel resolution and a .26 or .27 dot pitch that sells for between $190 and $240. Typical desktop and minitower PC configurations offer at least five PCI slots, with perhaps one AGP graphics slot. Bearing in mind that a modem, network interface card and sound card will occupy at least three slots, the two remaining slots provide just enough room for further expansion.XXXSPLITXXX-