The personal computer industry, in case you had not noticed, is in a slump. The average PC already has a processor of at least one gigahertz and users can see little reason to upgrade. After all, for office applications or Web surfing, a 1GHz processor is certainly fast enough for most users.
This is perhaps why Intel came up with the idea of hyperthreading. The latest batch of Pentium 4 processors comes with the ability to process multiple tasks, or threads, simultaneously. The effect is similar to running multiple processors. According to Intel, the biggest benefits will be for users interested in dabbling in audio or video editing. Even then, there are few applications yet written to exploit hyperthreading; so the full benefits are not noticeable beyond benchmarking.
We have spent the past few weeks with Dell's Dimension 8250. The unit we tried out came with a 3.06GHz Pentium 4, 17-inch flat screen, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard and DVD/CD-RW drive. Though the 3.06GHz model comes at a starting price of HK$11,688, those added options push the price to HK$15,155, which is pretty high for a desktop. But for the lower-end model, consisting of an old-fashioned 17-inch cathode ray monitor, 2.4GHz P4 chip and SoundBlaster Live sound card, the price is a more affordable HK$7,888.
While the flat screen adds more than HK$3,000 to the price, the biggest difference is down to the chip. A boxed 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor retails for about US$740, while a 2.4GHz can be yours for just US$220. With most of hyperthreading's benefits still in the future, the cash saving is hard to overlook.
We could also have pushed up the price by another HK$3,140 by picking the optional 128MB ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card, but the default 64MB GeForce 4 is already a powerful enough beast for most needs.
On the software side, the Dimension lacks office applications, but multimedia has been played up fairly well. The system comes with RealPlayer, Ulead's VideoStudio, Cyberlink PowerDVD and Roxio's EasyCD Creator. For security there is Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus and, for communications, Cyberphone from Taiwan software firm Goldensoft Technology. The operating system on our unit was Windows XP Home Edition.
