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By Paul Silverman
MidWest Micro's aim is true: Its P5-120 Home PC manages to hit two sweet spots in the systems market. With a budget price, it's a natural for home use, but its generous configuration and 120MHz Pentium power are likely to attract business users, too.
The review system had a 1.28-gigabyte Western Digital Caviar hard disk, 16MB of EDO RAM, 256KB of pipeline burst cache, an Acer 6X CD-ROM drive and an ATI mach64 video card with 2MB of VRAM. It also sports a 28.8Kb-per-second fax modem, an Aztech sound card and Labtec speakers. The monitor's 13.5-inch viewing area is a little bit skimpy.
The P5-120 really aired it out on our Wintune tests. Its CPU averaged 220.67MIPS, while the hard disk clocked in with a 3.0MB-per-second uncached data throughput and the video system scored 11.0Mpixels per second. On our macro tests, the unit had respectable results, averaging 23 seconds for Word and just under 16 seconds for Excel. These scores lag 133MHz Pentium systems by only a small margin.
Inside the mini-tower case three PCI slots are available, and the two ISA and one shared slot are used by the modem, sound card and video card, respectively. Three external bays are unoccupied; two are full-sized and one can hold a 3.5-inch device.
The P5-120's software is home-oriented, with Microsoft Works, CD Sampler, Money and Encarta 95, plus FaxWorks. There's also a variety of games and CompuServe.
A hardier software collection and larger monitor would fill the P5-120's gaps nicely. But this system merits a spot on your short list if you're seeking power on a tight budget.
Info File
MidWest Micro P5-120 Home PC
Price: $1,999
Pros: Multimedia components; performance
Cons: Monitor; software
MidWest Micro
800-203-3012, 513-368-2309
WinMag Box Score: 3.5
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