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Price or performance? On this month's power desktops chart, it's a toss-up between Pentium II-400 and Pentium II-450 PCs. Of the top five systems, numbers 1, 2, and 5 are equipped with the more affordable but still quick Pentium II-400. The overall Best Buy remains the Micron Millennia 400 Max, a fast general-business machine with a nice set of extras and a low price. The only newcomer to the top five is Gateway's GP6-450. It costs $272 more than the Micron, but it's a bit faster and comes with an ethernet card standard and a 19-inch monitor. Aside from the Gateway, six other new systems--all of them powered by Intel's Pentium II-450 CPU--earned spots on our power chart.
This Month's Best Buys
BEST BUY 1. Micron Millennia 400 Max
The Micron Millennia 400 Max set the performance standard among Pentium II-400 systems when we first reviewed it in July 1998. Six months later, its PC WorldBench 98 score of 210 still makes it the speediest Windows 95-based PII-400 system we've tested. At $2221, it's easy on the wallet, too. The Millennia 400 Max is loaded with features, and our readers tell us that the company's systems are reliable.
The Millennia 400 Max even looks fast, with chiseled curves and molded slots for the floppy, Zip, and DVD-ROM drives. The ports on the backofthesystem are helpfully color-coded, and the midtower's case opens easily to reveal a tidily arranged interior with plenty of open drive bays, card slots, and DIMM sockets.
The Diamond Viper V330 AGP card delivers snappy graphics, but the 17-inch monitor is less impressive. Images appeared washed out and a bit fuzzy at the edges. Sound quality of the bundled Advent AV390PL speakers and subwoofer was fine for common business use, but you have to crank up the volume to get any bass out of the subwoofer. Micron also bundles Microsoft Office 97 Small Business Edition and a 56- kilobits-per-second x2-compatible modem from 3Com.
Beyond the manuals for individual components, the documentation provided for the Millennia 400 Max is sparse. Micron offers 24-hour tech support and a solid five-year warranty on the CPU and main RAM, but its one-year labor warranty is shorter than we'd like.
PRO: Fastest Win 95 PII-400 we've tested,...