By James E. Miller

The AST Advantage 829 comes loaded with a 200MHz Pentium processor, 16MB of EDO RAM (upgradable to 128MB), 256KB of level 2 cache, an 8X CD-ROM drive and a 2.1-gigabyte Western Digital hard drive. And it's all available for well under $3,000.

But this desktop also delivers excellent performance. On our Wintune tests, the 829's processor clocked 358MIPS, and its application scores were 20 seconds for the Word macro and 17 seconds for the Excel macro.

The 829 has five ISA slots, a PCI slot and a shared PCI/ISA slot. Only the shared slot is used by the 28.8Kbps fax modem, so there's plenty of room for expansion. Crystal audio is built into the motherboard for Sound Blaster 16 compatibility with 3-D wavetable synthesis. The ATI Mach 64 graphics controller with 2MB of DRAM (and MPEG playback support) is also socketed into the motherboard. A two-button Logitech mouse and a Windows 95 keyboard round out the unit's configuration.

Three screws secure themini-tower case, but you must remove a screw from the case's bottom to get to the expansion slots. The modem card's connecting cable interferes with the ISA slots; move it to add more cards.

On the preproduction 829 I tested, the hard drive averaged an uncached disk throughput of 2.60MB per second. The hard drive occupies one of the three internal full-height bays; another is filled by the Torisan 8X CD-ROM drive; and a half-height bay holds the floppy drive.

The Advantage 829 offers speed and solid components, but you'll have to add one of your own-a monitor. Even so, this system is very attractive.

--Info File--
AST Advantage 829
Price: $2,799 (without monitor)
Pros: Performance; construction; software
Cons: Motherboard access; modem card cable blocks ISA slots
AST Research
800-876-4278, 714-727-4141
WinMag Box Score: 4.5