Save over 50 per cent on a 1GHz PC

It is a truth universally acknowledged that early adopters (aka people with more money than sense) pay through the nose to be the first kid on the block with the latest, greatest processor. A 1.0GHz Pentium III would set you back a cool $990 apiece if you could find 1,000 of them. An Athlon of the same speed comes in at $1,299. That equates to roughly $1 per MHz for the Intel part and $1.30 for the AMD Athlon. But there is a much cheaper way of getting 1GHz performance. The 500MHz Pentium III - which, let us not forget, was the bees knees in terms of performance and desirability a few short months ago - may be about to shuffle off to the Gulag, but is still available at a knockdown $193. That means you can buy five of them for the price of a single 1GHz part and still have enough change for a night on the town - that's 2.5GHz worth of performance for the price of 1GHz. Put another way, you could build a pseudo-gigahertz workstation with dual 500MHz CPUs and pay just 39 cents per Megahertz instead of 99 cents. Which makes the best economic sense? ®