After a couple of months the Pentium 4-3.4 GHz Extreme Edition and AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 are both widely available, and we've been quick to include these in the guide this month. Unfortunately, the extremely high price of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition made this month's guide a little lopsided, with the Intel system checking in at over $100 more than the AMD system, but performance still remaining consistent between the two. The extremely high price of the Pentium 4 EE put a damper on our hopes to secure enough of the budget to include a high end LCD in this month's guide. Instead, we recommended an LCD on the side, and did not include it in the overall price of the system for those of you who would prefer not to use a CRT.
Despite NVIDIA and ATI announcing new products over the past couple of weeks, neither company has boards available at retail, making them impossible to include in the guide this month. As both become available over the next few weeks you can be rest assured that we will be taking a look at both companies' products to determine which one will make the grade for next month's edition of the Extreme Buyer's Guide. Additionally, we are looking into making a full-blown LCD recommendation next month as there are some very nice high-end LCDs that might just make the grade. Hopefully, component prices will continue to drop at the ultra high-end, and let us push this system even farther with additional hardware improvements.
* Please note that the prices in our guide do not include shipping costs or taxes. The final system price also reflects a "best case" scenario of finding an online vendor that stocks the majority of internal components, or having access to a number of local computer retailers for system quotes and comparison shopping.
