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By John d Ruley
NT users demand high performance-and AST's Bravo MS-T 6200 delivers it, combining Intel's latest 200MHz Pentium Pro with 32MB of EDO memory, built-in 16-bit sound, a 2.5GB EIDE hard disk, an 8X CD-ROM drive and Matrox's outstanding MGA Millennium video card, all for just $2,855.
This price is significantly lower than that of other systems with comparable specs, which left me wondering what AST skimped on. The answer, in a word, is style. The MS-T 6200 doesn't have a sleek high-tech case; its plain beige mini-tower looks stodgy beside competing systems like Dell's OptiPlex GXPro (reviewed in our July cover story).
Once the screws are out, an easy pull lifts off the top, revealing a nicely laid out, compact motherboard mounted in the back of the case. AST uses an Intel 440FX PCI chipset. There are four PCI card slots (one taken by the Matrox MGA Millennium video card), and four open ISA slots. The back of the case includes standard PS/2-style mouse and keyboard connectors, two serial ports, a single parallel port, plus three stereo audio jacks and a game port connector for the built-in 16-bit sound.
The system has six drive bays-three 5.25 inch and three 3.5 inch. One 5.25-inch bay contains the CD-ROM drive, and two 3.5-inch bays are filled by the floppy drive and a Western Digital 2.5GB EIDE hard disk, so only three bays are open. A 15-inch AST Vision 7l monitor is provided.
The preproduction unit I evaluated included 4MB of WRAM (2MB is standard) on a Matrox Millennium video card (expandable to 8MB), and a 6X CD-ROM drive (production systems will have an 8X CD-ROM). With the Millennium, the MS-T 6200 achieved an almost unbelievable video score of 51Mpixels per second.
As for the other Wintune results, the CPU yielded a whopping 416MIPS. The uncached disk score, however, was a paltry 1.4MB per second. The unit was also extremely fast on our application benchmarks, completing the Word macro in 7.67 seconds and the Excel macro in 4.67 seconds.
The MS-T 6200 came preconfigured with NT Workstation 3.51. AST's price includes a free upgrade to NT 4.0.
The system's only shortcomings-other than its appearance-are the cheap plastic headset AST provides instead of speakers, and the absence of a built-in network card.
-- Info File --
AST Bravo MS-T 6200
Price: $2,855
Pros: Performance; value
Cons: Style; headset; hard disk performance; no built-in
network card
Platforms: NT
AST Computer
800-876-4278, 714-727-4141
WinMag Box Score 4.5
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