The following is from an article by Thomas Pabst, a leading PC hardware reviewer, that explains why you should not choose a large computer company to supply your custom computer system.

You've got $1600 or $2700 to spend on a new computer system. What will you do?

While I may not have reviewed any OEM-systems yet, I still need to keep track of what is going on in the PC-business, which means reading computer publications and checking the latest offers of the big OEMs as Dell, Gateway, Compaq, IBM, HP and Micron. Recently, when reading my favorite computer magazine, the German PC-gaming publication 'Gamestar', I was startled by an ad from Dell, offering a complete Pentium 4 system for the surprisingly low price of only $1500. I hardly believed my eyes, because I had considered Pentium 4 systems to be much more expensive. With that price, I thought, Pentium 4 is even able to compete against Athlon systems. Thus I had a closer look at this system, which goes by the name 'Dimension 8100'. After reading the equipment list of this system, I almost got angry. This particular wannabe-high end Dimension 8100 system, targeted to the rather critical German PC-buyer, had indeed teamed up a Pentium 4 1.3 GHz with NVIDIA's slowest TNT2 M64 3D-decelerator!

Pentium 4 Plus TNT2 M64? Insanity Par Excellence!

I was shocked. How could any sane person castrate the almost only strength of Intel's expensive Pentium 4 processor in 3D gaming with this pathetic graphics card? This seemed like a typical case of taking customers for fools, which really upset me. Instantly I went to my console and checked Dell's website to find out more details. I also looked at HP's, IBM's and Gateway's Pentium 4 system offers and found the very same situation. All those great OEMs are trying to ride Intel's Pentium 4 marketing pony by selling 'reasonably priced' Pentium 4 systems in highly mediocre configurations. The inexperienced customer might indeed get fooled by Intel's juicy promises of this supposed high-end processor, and completely overlook that the other components in those systems ensure mediocre performance.

Gateway, HP and IBM are offering the same ridiculous configuration. Please be wise and don't fall for it. I mentioned it before; the PC-market has nothing to do with common sense. If the decision makers at Dell, HP, Gateway or IBM would think in a straight forward kind of way, they wouldn't offer those crappy P4-boxes and hype them with empty 'cutting edge' phrases. Why do those guys get away with it? Because there are hundreds of thousands of uninformed people out there who will continue to fall for hollow marketing phrases and throw their money away. The TV commercials of those OEMs may sound as sweet as they want, but the minds behind those $1600 P4-boxes are merely out to take advantage of the uninformed. It's close to modern robbery.

So what's the bottom line? Well, firstly I have to repeat myself for the 10,000th time, reminding you that systems with AMD's Athlon or Duron processors are the best you can get for your money right now. I guess it is pretty obvious that the purchase of a Pentium 4 system for $1600 is one of the least sensible things you could do with that amount of money. I also don't want to fail to mention that you can of course configure a Pentium 4 box that beats Micron's Millennia MAX XP in a few benchmarks, but for what price? I leave it up to you to decide what you want to think about Dell, the only large OEM that still doesn't offer systems with AMD processors. Are they really caring about their customers? I honestly wonder ...

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