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Complete listing of June 1996 reviews
By James Alan Miller
THE BEST THING about the Liuski Magitronic Pentium 133MHz Multimedia System is its price. For $2,400 you get a 133MHz Pentium PC with a 1.28GB Seagate hard disk, an ExpertColor DSP3364P video card with 2MB of DRAM and a 16-bit sound card. A GoldStar quad-speed CD-ROM drive, a microphone, headphones and two speakers round out the feature set.
The 15-inch monitor performed poorly, as it displayed some moir... patterns and seemed out of focus. I could barely get the picture sharp enough to be satisfactory. For the record, the monitor has a 0.28mm dot pitch and supports a maximum resolution of 1280x1024 pixels. It complies with the VESA DPMS power management guidelines and the Swedish MPRII standards for electromagnetic radiation.
The system's tower case has lots of free drive bays for expansion: five internal 3.5-inch and three external 5.25-inch bays. Unfortunately, two of the three empty PCI slots are blocked by the DB-25, DB-9, parallel and PS/2 mouse connector brackets. A better idea would have been to free up the slots by putting the connectors on the case's back panel. What's more, two of the SIMM slots are blocked by an internal drive bay, so upgrading the unit's 16MB of RAM promises to be a hassle.
Performance readings on WINDOWS Magazine's Wintune benchmarks were about what you'd expect for a system of this configuration, with scores of 245.33MIPS for the CPU, 2.53MB per second for the uncached hard disk and 10.17Mpixels per second for video. Scores on our Excel 95 and Word 95 macros were 21 and 14.67 seconds, respectively.
The Magitronic system comes with Windows 95 pre-installed and a plethora of bundled software.
Info File
Liuski Magitronic Pentium 133MHz Multimedia System
Price: $2,400
Pros: Price; open drive bays
Cons: Monitor; blocked slots
Liuski International
800-4-LIUSKI, 770-849-0667
WinMag Box Score: 2.0
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