Back-to-School Desktop Deals You’ll Want to Avoid
Well, it’s back-to-school-time again, which means every retail outlet under the sun is pushing hard to sell PCs. And with Intel’s extremely fast Core 2 Duo chips starting to take over the desktop market and push down prices on older, slower tech you’d think that the retail outlets would have some pretty sweet deals. Unfortunately, that’s not what I’m seeing.
One of my coworkers here mentioned she was looking at new PCs and wondered if this season’s retail deals were worth pursuing. I took a quick look through the Sunday ads for Best Buy, CompUSA, Office Depot–all the usual suspects–and found some pretty unimpressive results.
Retail PCs around the $1000 mark shared a pretty common set of specs: 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, integrated graphics, a 17-inch LCD, and either an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ or a Pentium D 915 chip. That’s OK, I guess. Problem is, in a month or so, you’ll be able to buy a much faster low-end Core 2 Duo system for the same price. How do I know that? Simple. You can get one online right now.
See here’s the interesting thing about Intel’s Core 2 Duo line: It’s already available across most of the price spectrum. NewEgg has the low-end Core 2 Duo E6300 chip for $203. That’s cheap enough to provide the backbone for a respectable $1000 system. And sure enough, HP Shopping, or CyberPower, and pretty much any other build-to-order vendor will let you configure a $1000 PC with everything you’ll find from a retail box, plus the much faster CPU.
While it’s hardly news that boxed, retail configurations lag behind build-to-order machines in adopting the latest technology, it’s rare that a next generation CPU would target the mainstream PC market so quickly. In this case, Core 2 Duo just happened to roll out a little bit too late to make it into mainstream retail PCs for the back-to-school crowd.
So if you’re shopping for a new PC for yourself or your college student, do yourself a favor: Shop online or wait until mainstream Core 2 Duo systems show up in retail. For the same money you’ll get a much faster system.
*source from http://blogs.pcworld.com/
