Hello, welcome to the late Monday blurb today. The reason why it was difficult finishing it on time is that I have taken some time off to spend it with Kate this week. I still hope that I could think of an interesting topic for you.

Which Kind Of System Should I Buy?

Recently I had to remind myself that the vast majority of CPUs, motherboard, graphics cards and so on are actually purchased in complete systems. I even wonder how many readers of this website are taking the effort of putting their own system together with single components from scratch. Thus I think it makes sense focussing on systems rather than single components in this Monday Blurb. People who go out looking for a complete system are much better targets for marketing campaigns, because it is much more difficult to have an overview over 10 different components than simply picking one part that suits you best. Complete systems sell a lot better over the price than anything else. Many of us accept a few mid or even low-range components in a system that's overall cheap, and the ones of us who want to spend a lot of money are mostly guided by brand names like Compaq, Dell or Gateway, rather than the particular components inside this system. The average user doesn't have the time, nor the desire to do a major research that could easily take several weeks. He decided long enough how much of his money he wants to spend for his computer, and once the decision has been made, he wants to get that long awaited system as soon as possible.

The CPU Decides Over The Price Tag

The start for almost anyone of us, regardless if he purchases a whole system or builds one up from scratch, is to decide which processor is going to be running the system. If you look at the ads supplied by all the large and also the smaller OEMs and system integrators, you will always find that that the displayed systems are most of the time only determined by the processor. Here is where Intel got very successful with their 'segmentation'-idea. People are supposed to use a Celeron processor in low budget systems and a Pentium II in mid to high-end machines. You can also get a Pentium II Xeon if you wish to build up a super power workstation. The important thing for us is the fact that the other components in those systems get along with this segmentation idea. Thus you will mostly find low end graphics cards and hard drives in Celeron systems, if you want top notch 3D and hard disk power, you need to go for a Pentium II system instead. If you are even asking for systems with SCSI or high-end OpenGL-performance and video editing abilities, you will only find top notch Pentium II and soon even only Pentium III systems that will suit your needs. Now most of you may think that this is absolutely fine, Intel and the OEMs have after all put a huge marketing effort into getting us hooked to this idea. However, the real situation is significantly different.

High-End Socket7-Motherboards?

Last week I received a message from Peter Kunte, who described me his surprise about the fact that he never found a Socket7-board with onboard-SCSI. As a matter of fact there doesn't seem to be any board for AMD's K6-2 that hosts a SCSI controller, and I started wondering myself. Of course the explanation is simple. K6-2 has been pushed into the area for cost-effective low-end systems, where nobody would ever bother about SCSI. In other words, it simply wouldn't sell. You won't find any Socket370-systems with SCSI either. The large OEMs as well as Intel have made sure that the only space for AMD's pretty well performing K6-2 is the space of the cheap systems. The Celeron for Socket370 has got the same faith, Intel smiled at me when I asked them if they wouldn't fear Celeron threatening Pentium II sales. "Don't expect that anyone, who wants a well performing system will get Celeron. Those people will only get satisfied by Pentium II or Pentium III-systems".

AMD Not Ready For High-End Campaign?

The next thing I did was asking Dana Krelle, AMD's VP of marketing, if AMD wasn't interested in giving a very strong signal to OEMs as well as motherboard manufacturers, to make sure that K6-3 will only run on well equipped platforms. A K6-3-system that has a CPU-performance high enough to compete with Intel's fastest Pentium II and Pentium III-processors should not run in a typically cheap and mediocre equipped Socket7-system, should it? I caught Dana on the wrong foot, he wasn't able to give me any meaningful answer to that question at all, it seems as if AMD has accepted playing the dog in the cheap-systems corner of computer stores.