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[ Go to March 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by David Hafke
At first glance, the MidWest Micro Office Pro 180 may not bowl you over. You won't find the sound card or modem that are now standard on other systems. But it's a solid performer priced at only $1,829, incredibly low for a Pentium Pro PC. The Office Pro 180 comes with a 15-inch monitor, 256KB of level 2 cache, a 2.5GB hard drive, an Acer 8X CD-ROM drive and an STB Lightspeed 128 with 2MB of MDRAM. Its Intel motherboard contains three PCI slots, three ISA slots and one shared slot. All expansion slots are available except for one PCI slot, which holds the Lightspeed 128. The system's 16MB of EDO RAM (upgradable to 128MB) occupies two of the four SIMM slots. There are two internal 3.5-inch drive bays, and three 5.25-inch external drive bays. The Office Pro 180 comes loaded with Windows 95, Microsoft Office Professional and the Plus Pack for Windows 95. NT, which would provide much better performance on a Pentium Pro, is an option. This system is a solid performer. It churned out 377MIPS and 1.57MB per second uncached disk throughput. It executed our Word application macro in an average of 14.67 seconds and took an average time of 9.67 seconds to complete our Excel macro. While it has lots to recommend it, the Office Pro 180 doesn't have quite enough oomph to push its rivals off our Recommended List. The HP Vectra VA 6/200 MT, Dell Dimension XPS Pro 200n and Gateway 2000 G6-180 FPC offer more features, although at higher prices.
Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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