Top 15 Notebook PCs

New portables equipped with Intel’s high-powered Pentium III Processor-M CPU nearly pulled off a clean sweep of our power chart this month. The new processor’s bus speed increases from 100 MHz (the PIII chip’s standard) to 133 MHz, and the secondary cache doubles to 512KB. The top-rated Dell Inspiron 8100, which carries a PIII-M-1000/733 chip, posted a PC WorldBench 2000 score of 197, a 7 percent improvement in performance over PIII-1000/700 notebooks.