Gateway 600MHz Athlon box spotted

They said it could never happen, but it did. And now European sceptics can get to see it with their own eyes -- an Athlon-powered Gateway PC is on sale across the manufacturer's Europe, Middle East and Africa territory. The Gateway Select 600 is based on the (you guessed it) 600MHz AMD Athlon and is available now, so Gateway says. Priced at £999 (exc. VAT) the Select 600 also has 128MB RAM, 10GB HDD, 1373 digital sound and 16MB Voodoo 3 graphics card, CD-RW, 17in monitor, DVD V + Soft DVD drive and a 56kbps modem. You also get a printer and the PC comes with Win 98 and MS Works Suite 2000 thrown in. Gateway is also offering a £49 per month purchase scheme on the Select 600. Mike Maloney, Gateway consumer sales director, said the Athlon-based machine offers "our customers excellent performance coupled with great value and supports our philosophy of presenting our customers with leading-edge, cost-effective solutions that meet their technology requirements". So, nothing to do with a dearth of Intel chips and the damage that may have already caused the PC maker. First inklings that Gateway was ready to talk turkey with AMD started to reach Vulture Central shortly before Christmas, courtesy of tech support details for the Athlon cropping up on part of Gateway's Web site. These references soon disappeared, but shortly after the so-called Millennium celebrations came to a halt, the cow-friendly PC outfit came clean and -- as reported on The Register -- said it would, indeed, be using non-Intel chips, leaving Intel with only one faithful and trusty servant among the big name PC makers -- Dell. ® Related Stories Gateway to use AMD because of Intel chip famine Gateway stealth-launches Athlon PCs