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December 1996 Reviews This Month
By James E. Powell
The new ALR Evolution 5ST Pentium 200 system is aptly named: It shows just how far computers have evolved. Best of all, it's a fast performer for a moderate price.
The system I tested included an Intel 200MHz Pentium processor (with Intel's new 430FX chipset), 16MB of RAM (expandable to 128MB), 256KB of level 2 pipeline-burst cache, a 1.6-gigabyte Western Digital Caviar IDE hard drive and a Sanyo 6X CD-ROM drive.
The system has four ISA slots, three PCI slots (one is taken by the Diamond Stealth 64 model 3240 video card with 2MB of VRAM) and one shared ISA/PCI slot. There are three external 5.25-inch bays (one is taken by the CD-ROM), a single external 3.5-inch bay (occupied by the 3.5-inch disk drive) and three internal 3.5-inch bays (one is taken by the hard drive). It's all powered by a 250-watt power supply.
On the back of the system are PS/2 plugs for the keyboard and mouse, plus one bidirectional ECP parallel and two 16550-compatible serial ports. A curved plastic cover slides up to protect the external drive bays.
The Evolution scored well on our Wintune 95 tests. It registered 361MIPS for its processor, 15Mpixels per second on the video test and a 3.1MB per second uncached data-transfer rate for its hard disk. It completed the Word macro in an average of 17 seconds and the Excel test in 13.3 seconds.
The Evolution 5ST ships with an ALR two-button mouse and an ALR 104-key keyboard that had a comfortable feel to it. My test system also included ALR's 15-inch flat tube Clearview monitor with a 0.28-millimeter dot pitch. The only preloaded software was Windows 95. The Evolution had no modem or sound card.
-- Info File --
ALR Evolution 5ST
Price: $2,976
Pros: Performance
Cons: Only one full-length ISA slot
Platforms: 3X, 95, NT
ALR
800-444-4ALR, 714-581-6770
WinMag Box Score: 3.5
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