By Jonathan Blackwood

The new Cyrix 6x86-P200 mini-tower system may not be the fastest PC on the planet that's an Intel competitor offering compatibility with x86 software, but it's darn close.

The nicely equipped Cyrix 6x86-P200 turned in 150MHz Pentium level performance on our Wintune processor tests, but its video, disk and memory performance were remarkable. And its application performance-8.67 and 8.0 seconds on our Word and Excel benchmarks, respectively-bested any Pentium system we've seen.

Such performance isn't bad for a system that, fully loaded, is yours for a little over five grand. The test machine came with a Seagate ST1515 4-gigabyte SCSI hard disk, a CMD Fast/Wide controller with 64MB of cache-that's not a misprint-a Matrox MGA Millennium video adapter with 2MB of WRAM and a Mitsumi 8X ATAPI CD-ROM drive. It also included a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Awe32 wavetable sound card and a high-quality Labtec 3D Speaker System with Subwoofer. In addition, there was a good 15-inch MAG InnoVision DX1595 monitor. Finishing out the package were 32MB of EDO RAM (256MB maximum), 256KB of pipeline-burst cache, three externally accessible 5.25-inch drive bays (one available), three 3.5-inch drive bays (one external, two internal available), two ISA slots (one available), three PCI slots (two available) and one shared ISA/PCI slot. The motherboard uses a VLSI Technology Lynx chipset, which allows it to operate at 75MHz, rather than the Intel motherboards' 66MHz.

The only possible downside is the Cyrix chip, which, while compatible, is not from Intel and is a new design at this speed rating.

--Info File--
Cyrix 6x86-P200
Price: $5,169
Pros: Application performance; configuration; price
Cons: Design
Cyrix Corp.
800-340-7501, 214-968-8387
WinMag Box Score: 5.0