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December 1996 Reviews This Month
By Deborah K. Wong
The IBM PC 350 has more to brag about than 200MHz power, lots of room for growth and blazing speed. It's also got an innovative new networking feature.
You enter the system by unlocking a plastic sliding security door that protects the floppy disk drive and an 8X Hitachi CD-ROM drive. The snap-off case then glides off smoothly.
Once inside, you'll find IBM's Wake on LAN feature, which updates files and tracks computer equipment from a remote location-even when the PC is powered off.
The PC 350 packs in the power, with Intel's 200MHz Pentium processor, a 3.2GB Aquarius hard disk, 32MB of EDO RAM (expandable to 192MB) and 512KB of pipeline-burst level 2 cache.
There's plenty of room for expansion. The PC 350 has three PCI slots (two are available), five ISA slots (four available) and three shared ISA/PCI slots, one of which holds a Matrox Graphics video card with 4MB of WRAM. There are two 3.5-inch internal bays (one free), and one 3.5-inch and two 5.25-inch external bays (with one 5.25-inch bay available). The system is ready for the next wave in technology with its trendy new dual USB port.
On our Wintune 95 benchmarks, the system knocked out a blazing 3.4MB per second uncached disk throughput and an excellent 360.67MIPS for the CPU. On our Word and Excel application macros, the unit clocked good scores of 9.67 and 11 seconds, respectively. Although these scores are fast, they are not quite at the top of their P200 class.The system does not include a sound card or modem.
--Info File--
IBM PC 350
Price: Without monitor, $3,074; with 17-inch monitor, $4,143
Pros: Network solutions
Cons: No sound card, modem
Platforms: 3x, 95, NT
IBM PC Co.
800-426-2968
WinMag Box Score 4.0
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