| This is a fair price for a system this feature rich and powerful, but I would suggest looking at the cheaper 750 if you value price a little more than performance. If you are a major performance nut then Sony is probably not your brand. It is more a balance of performance, price and lots of cool extras. Dell or Gateway are better values for performance junkies but they don't have the extras that Sony does so well at. This is not the fastest P4 system on the market but it is one of the better mid-cost systems you will find. Sony's build quality is very high, and they include lots of extra features and software. Nothing is free and Sony has done a decent job of making the right trade-offs to keep the price down on this system without selling you a bland box you can't use. CPU: Intel P4 Nortwood 2GHz w/512k L2. A great CPU today, and with more software supporting its SSE2 features, the best investment for tomorrow. AMD has fallen about a year behind Intel and is desperately trying to catch up, so I would mark them off my list till mid 2003. Chipset: Sis650 a good chipset, not as fast as Intel's 845 or 850 series, but it cost a lot less. Memory: The ... review has this wrong. This system comes with 512M PC2100 DDR running at 266MHz. Without boring you with a long explanation lets just say that it is not quite as fast as PC800 RDRAM (Rambus) but still much faster than what came on older systems. FSB: 400Mhz not 533MHz (ignore what the ... review state). ... seems to have trouble with getting a few facts right on this line of Sonys. 533 would be great but 400 is fine and cost less. This is a concern only for power users. Grapics: Sis Integrated "Real256" - Not a Nvidia chip (despite what the ... review says) this was developed in-house by Sis as a DirectX 7 compliant graphics chip. The latest games coming out now are DirectX 8 (and beyond). They will work fine on this graphics chip, but not at the highest quality settings (something I find disappointing in this price range). The good news is it comes with a AGP slot so in when you want to step up you can buy a new video card. I suggest ATI cards over Nvidia cards for overall quality if you do this. OS: Windows XP, which is far superior to Win98SE or Windows ME. As much as I hate the 'activation' feature, it is the best thing going for most people. Features: Sony is the best at adding in lots of useful things like, Firewire/I-link ports (for hooking all kinds of stuff like a digital video camera to adding an external DVD-RW drive), built in ethernet, modem, and sound. Also a CDRW and DVD drive. One down side: no USB 2.0 ports. Software: Comes with Corel WordPerfect Office, PC-Cillin anti-virus software, and Sony's in house video software. Good bundle that comes a lot cheaper than MS Office and Norton Anti-virus. | .jpg)
