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February 1998
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Eval
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Three Vendors Make an Alpha Bet
/ Something in Common: AlphaPC 164SX Motherboard
The three machines I tested are truly cut from the same cloth. All rely on some adaptation of Digital's (ATX standard) AlphaPC 164SX motherboard. The connectors for dual DB9 serial, parallel, PS/2 mouse, and PS/2 keyboard ports are soldered directly to the motherboard. Familiar Pentium ATX motherboard extras like video, network
ing, universal serial bus (USB), SCSI, and sound are absent here. In fact, none of the systems reviewed had sound cards, which can be helpful
even for serious work.
The 164SX motherboard gives you room for two pairs of 168-pin, unbuffered synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) DIMMs. Using 128-MB DIMMs, you can squeeze 512 MB of RAM into your machine. The CPU is heavily cached, with internal 8-KB instruction and data caches, a 96-KB Level 2 shared cache, and 2 MB of synchronous static Level 3 cache RAM on the motherboard.
The 164SX's on-board hard disk controller is Enhanced IDE, a choice I found surprising in a high-performance machine. Far less expensive Pentium Pro and Pentium II motherboards come with an on-board Ultra Wide SCSI controller. Fortunately, the 164SX has plenty of room for expansion: two dedicated ISA slots and four PCI slots (two 32-bit, two 64-bit).
Matthew Wilson more...
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Something in Common: AlphaPC 164SX Motherboard
