Two Drives Are Better Than One

Selinda Chiquoine

Sys Technology offers a line of Pentium Pro workstations for prices that may cause Gateway to sell off some cattle. The single-CPU Performance Pro 200 comes with the P/I-P6RP4 motherboard by AsusTek (runner-up of BYTE's Best System award at Computex Taipei) and the same high-quality components found in many of the 150-MHz Pentium Pro systems from leading U.S. vendors. But the Sys machine one-ups many of its competitors with two Quantum 1.28-gigabyte EIDE hard drives, a V.34 modem, Sound Blaster 16 with SCSI-2, and a 200-MHz CPU. The Performance Pro 200 comes with a smaller monitor (15-inch versus 17-inch), but you still get a lot of bang for your buck.

The AsusTek P/I-P6RP4 motherboard is similar to Intel's Aurora motherboard in that it use s Intel's 82450KX (Orion) chip set and has four PCI slots, three ISA slots, and a ZIF CPU socket. The P/I-P6RP4 hosts a proprietary MediaBus extension on one PCI slot for AsusTek's optional multif unction multimedia cards, and it accepts 150-, 166-, 180-, and 200-MHz Pentium Pros, thanks in part to its upgradable voltage-regulator module.

The Performance Pro 200's chassis is a compact mini-tower with two 5 1/4-inch and one 3 1/2-inch drive bays available for expansion. The system can hold as much as 512 MB of 60-nanosecond-or-faster 72-pin DRAM SIMMs, with support for ECC. The problem I see here is that with all four RAM banks filled, only the lowest ISA slot can hold a full-length ISA card. Our review system had 64 MB of 60-ns parity RAM.

Pentium Pro PCs will appeal to engineers using 32-bit OSes, so we ran all the benchmarks under Windows NT. The Sys machine's BYTEmark scores (strictly CPU and FPU) equal those earned by ALR's 200-MHz Evol ution Dual6; ALR's dual-CPU architecture translated into faster performance in Intel's High-End Test Suite, but the Performance Pro 200's superior hard drive system drove its SysMark scores to top the charts. Next time I go system shopping, I'm going to call Sys Technology.

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WHERE TO FIND

Performance Pro 200....................$6435 as tested

Sys Technology, Inc.
Cypress, CA
Phone:    (800) 613-9963 or (714) 821-3900
Fax:      (714) 821-9592
Internet: 
http://www.systechnology.com

Circle 1021 on Inquiry Card.

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Benchmarks

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Performance Pro 200

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