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By Marc Spiwak
Somehow, the sum of the Pionex Elite Pentium 200's parts don't add up to a high price. This system is loaded, but has a price of only $2,499.
The Elite's parts inventory starts with a 2.1GB Conner hard drive, 16MB of EDO RAM and 512KB of level 2 cache. Add in a Diamond Stealth 64 graphics accelerator with 2MB of VRAM, a 16-bit Ensoniq wavetable sound card, a set of serviceable speakers, a 28.8Kbps fax modem and a Toshiba 8X CD-ROM drive.
The system's 15-inch Princeton monitor delivers a bright, clear 13.9-inch diagonal picture, but a 17-inch model would have better complemented such a high-performance computer. A Windows 95 keyboard and Microsoft mouse complete the configuration. This adds up to a lot of quality hardware for the money.
The Elite performed well on our Wintune tests, with a 361MIPS CPU score, 5.0MB per second uncached
hard disk throughput and a video rating of 18Mpixels per second. On the application tests, an indication of likely real-world performance, the Elite clocked 15.67 seconds for the Word macro and 10.33 seconds for the Excel macro. All these scores are very good.
The Toshiba 8X CD-ROM drive had an average access time of 129 milliseconds and a data-transfer rate of 1.23MBps-slightly above the 8X rating of 1.2MB per second.
The system came with Windows 95, Novell Perfect-Office, Quicken, PhoneDisc and several other software titles.
For towering performance and high-end parts at a bargain-basement price, it'll be hard to beat the FMG Pionex Elite.
Info File
FMG Pionex Elite Pentium 200
Price: $2,499
Pros: Performance; expandability; price
Cons: Monitor
FMG-NJ
800-357-6203, 908-560-3610
WinMag Box Score: 3.5
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