There's a fairly bizarre review over at Anandtech.

Initially, it was supposed to show how sub-$100 CPUs do. Then it talks about budget sub-$1000 OEM systems and how retail customers ought to pay attention to the "shocking results."

The benchmarks show Athlon XPs thrashing Celerons all of the time, and even the cheapy Duron 1.6GHz winning just about all the time.

If the review had just stuck with sub-$100 processors, that would have been fine. Nothing would have been bizarre about that at all. That would have been fair enough and made an important point.

But it didn't stop there. The review also included an ancient 1.8A PIV. That's what made it bizarre, and opens up Pandora's box.

I haven't seen too many 1.8A machines on sale lately (at least not new ones), have you?

What I have seen are plenty of medium-range PIV machines for sale.

Yes, those processors cost over $100, but so did the 1.8A. Keep in mind though, that $150-160 price tag only applies when you buy it yourself. However, if you let somebody like Dell buy it for you, the picture rather changes.

Especially when you see offers like this from Dell over at www.techbargains.com (dated 12/4):

Budget Desktop $349

$50 less, More RAM, and freebies this week.
Dimension 2400 Desktop P4-2.53Ghz 256MB/40GB HD, Free Printer, PDA, or camera, 48x CD Writer, Ethernet, Modem, Word Perfect/MS Money, XP Home $599 - $50 discount in cart - $200 rebate = $349 shipped free.

Click Outrageous Deal - $349 in middle left box, Customize it on left config, Select Free Printer, PDA, or camera - ISP

Performance Desktop $439

Pentium 4 with HT Technology, Intel 865 chipset with dual channel DDR memory, AGP 8x and more
Dimension 4600 Desktop P4-2.6Ghz/800Mhz bus 256MB/40GB HD, Free Printer, PDA, or camera, 48x CD, Ethernet, Modem, Word Perfect/MS Money, XP Home $439 after $200 instant discount in cart, shipped for free. 17" e171FP LCD +$350, save $100.

Select Choose Dimension, Customize it on 4600, 2.6Ghz P4 HT/XP Home/Basic Audio - Continue, 256MB/Dell 2-button Mouse/Select Free Printer, PDA, or camera/Productivity Pack/40GB Value/No floppy/48x CD/Integrated graphics/No speakers/select ISP - Continue, 1 year warranty - continue, Add to cart

Those look pretty cost-competitive to me compared to Athlon systems. If you're telling people out to buy OEM computers what to get, shouldn't you include processors like these if the total cost of the computer is comparable?

It also would have been far more educational for the average retail buyer to demonstrate the degree of difference between current PIV systems and a 2.4 Celeron system, and how much difference a couple extra hundred (if even that) could make. They'd also see the (much smaller) difference between the 2.4C and the XP systems.

But then, that would have a left a somewhat different impression for the casual to careless reader, now wouldn't it?

You can approach a review like this one of two ways. You can limit the scope, keep it to sub-$100 processors, compare apples to apples, and that's OK.

Or you can be more educational and also show a somewhat broader range of choices to demonstrate how much (or little) you lose by going with a sub-$100 processor.

What you shouldn't do is compare apples to an orange that is turning green just to show that apples taste better.

Ed