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[ Go to July 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by Marc Spiwak
QUantex's latest 200MHz Pentium Pro has an attractive price, and it's a mighty fast system to boot-no pun intended. The updated configuration of the Quantex QP6/200 WS-4 uses an Adaptec AHA 2940 PCI SCSI controller to power a massive Seagate 4.3GB hard drive and a Toshiba 12X SCSI CD-ROM drive. This network-ready system has a built-in 3Com EtherLink XL PCI network card, as well as a Matrox Millennium PCI graphics accelerator with 4MB of WRAM. All four ISA slots are free; one shares bracket space with the only free PCI slot. The ATX motherboard offers 64MB of EDO RAM (expandable to 128MB). Although there's no Universal Serial Bus (USB) cutout on the case, the motherboard has a USB connector. The MAG InnoVision DX1795 17-inch monitor has a 16.1-inch viewing area with a 0.26mm dot pitch, which produces a clear, bright image. Since NT 4.0 Workstation was the only software included, we loaded Wintune 95 and Office 95 to perform benchmark tests, under which the Quantex delivered 416MIPS, 3MB per second uncached disk speed and average macro scores of 6.33 seconds for Word and 4.33 seconds for Excel. The WinList's Dell Dimension XPS Pro 200n scored 0.33 seconds faster on the Excel macro but 0.33 seconds slower on Word. The Quantex system's speedy hard drive, with 8ms average access time and 7200rpm, helps it to complete Word macros quickly. Although the Quantex lacks a sound card and speakers, it offers double the RAM, hard-drive space and video memory of the WinList's Pionex Elite Pentium Pro. For those reasons, the Quantex-which is great for analytical and graphical work-takes Pionex's WinList spot.
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