133MHz FSB Socket 370 FC-PGA
Current Cost: $178
At 866MHz, the Pentium III provides excellent performance in business applications at a price point that won't kill the bottom line. SSE support dramatically accelerates floating point intensive business applications, including PhotoShop and Dragon Naturally Speaking, making these processor intensive applications easier to bear. Its 256k of on-die full-speed L2 cache seems to help keep the performance up to par when you're running several tasks at the same time, and its use of a 133MHz front side bus helps keep data within easy reach of the CPU.
Overall, the Pentium III 866MHz processor provides the right performance at the right price to be our pick in the Value Business PC, especially when matched to a full-feature, integrated motherboard.
OR...
100 MHz FSB Socket A
Current Cost: $171
For $171, you can get an Athlon Thunderbird running at 1GHz. With 256k of full-speed on-die L2 cache, the Athlon Thunderbird manages to perform about the same as an equivalently clocked Pentium III. In the past, there have been concerns about the stability of AMD based systems but AMD has made large efforts with reasonable success to correct the reasons for these perceptions. The AMD Duron also has good bang for the buck ($86/Duron 850) but the Athlon Thunderbirds are only slightly more expensive with much better performance.