System Building: What's Hot, What's Not

What's Hot

LCD monitors: The advantages of LCD monitors are well-known: Their small footprint takes up less room on a desk and text is considerably sharper and easier on the eyes than a CRT. What you may not know is they also consume a lot less power, from half to one-third as much power as a comparable CRT monitor. Multiplying that over several hundred or thousands of monitors can make a big difference in your electric bill. An emerging submarket of the LCD sector is one that includes Microsoft's Smart Display, formerly code-named "Mira." The first Smart Displays will come from ViewSonic, to be followed by monitors from Fujitsu, NEC, Philips Electronics and TriGem Computer.

For all these reasons, putting the CRT monitor out to pasture is a real good idea, and should happen in greater numbers this year, VARs predict.

"I think CRTs will be pretty much out of the market by Christmas," says Joe Bhaghani, president of Alpha Business Computers, a systems builder in Corona, Calif. "A 15-inch LCD monitor is $229 now. By Christmas, it will be down to $150, and it's like having a 17-inch CRT monitor, so who would want a CRT?"

Serial ATA: The new hard drive means a small plug, approximately the size of a PS/2 plug on a keyboard, and a thin, round cable to the motherboard. Good riddance to the wide, 80-pin ATA cable. No one will miss that.

"The ATA cable has been around so long, it's about time it went away," says Peter Kim, CTO for Ahanix, a systems builder in City of Industry, Calif. "The bandwidth won't make a big deal, but with cooling and wire clutter being more of a concern, especially for laptops, Serial ATA will help quite a bit."

Seagate was first to market with a Serial ATA drive with the 80-GB Barracuda 7200.7 drives late last year. Last month, Western Digital entered the foray with the WD Raptor, a 10,000-RPM drive with a modest 36 GB of storage capacity.

S-h-h-h-h

Kim's company specializes in building systems that are ultra-quiet and have low power consumption. With the high end of Pentium and Athlon chips hitting scalding temperatures, computer cases are starting to sound like a Jumbo jet engine on takeoff.

"Companies are getting sick of the noise from their PCs," he says. "I'm seeing a lot of interest in quiet cases, quiet power supplies and quiet CPU fans, so people can work [in] peace."

DVD-ROM/DVD-R: There's hardly any content on DVD-ROM for the PC, but because it's backwards-compatible with CD-ROM, and the recordable DVD-R drives can write both to a CD-R and DVD-R (plus the near parity in price), PC buyers can consolidate from as many as four drives to two.

Double Data Rate (DDR) SDRAM: It's an SDRAM world, with 333-MHz and 400-MHz SDRAM increasing in quantities,a big step up from the 100/133-MHz speeds that dominated the market for so long.

Tablet PC: There have been so many efforts at developing the perfect pen PC, but it looks like Microsoft finally got it right with the Tablet PC. It may take off as a laptop replacement, which is ironic given that with laptops becoming so powerful, they are often used as replacements to the desktop.

"A lot of people have been talking about replacing their laptops with the Tablet PC," Bhaghani says. "It's smaller and you don't have to open a lid to use it."

What's Not

RDRAM: This isn't difficult to predict because Rambus memory is nowhere to be found on Intel's future product road maps, even for its Xeon and Itanium servers. "I won't say RDRAM is being phased out, but I think sales of RDRAM will probably go way down," Kim says.

CD-ROM and floppies: CD-ROM simply isn't needed, and it looks like something will finally kill the floppy drive--USB flash-memory sticks. These sticks are about the size of lighters, plug into USB ports, and offer storage from 32 MB up to 256 MB, for under $99.

There's been a host of contenders to retire the 1.44-MB floppy drive--LS/120 floppies, ZIP drives, JAZZ drives, ORB drives, to name a few--but they were proprietary drives that went inside internal bays and were costly.

"The difference here is we're taking advantage of what's already in the PC," says Omid Rahmat, general manager for Tom's Guides Publishing, the parent company of Tom's Hardware Guide, a popular hardware reviews site. "PCs come with USB ports built in, and we just stick a device in the USB port and we're done. Plus, the price is very low."

Add-in cards: Stock a few sound cards for the gamers and NICs for people with old PCs. After that, you won't need many peripheral cards. That's because motherboard-makers put all of those parts on the motherboard. It's almost impossible to find a motherboard that doesn't have a 10/100-Mb NIC and AC97 sound card built in, along with the usual ports (USB, 1394 FireWire).

"Motherboard vendors have found it's difficult to differentiate on performance today, so they are integrating USB, FireWire, Ethernet, because then it adds value to the system and reduces the overall cost of the system," Rahmat says.

Windows 9x, NT: When Microsoft ships the next-generation of Office this year, it will not support the Windows 9x codebase. Can't say we blame them. Windows XP is the only operating system being sold as the default operating system; you have to ask for an older OS, and in many cases, you can't get it.

What's Lukewarm

64-bit AMD chips: AMD's big gambit is still in a holding pattern. It could be a big hit or a big failure, but it's hard to tell. There's no committed OS, even with the chips due by summer, and supply will be extremely limited. Kim says he heard of initial supplies being around 50,000 units, and not improving any time soon.

"Everyone's expecting a lot of sales from [64-bit chips], but even AMD said initial quantities will be limited, so it's going to be difficult to sell something we don't have," he says.