AST Advantage

AST has generally relied on larger corporate clients for its PC market. The AST Advantage is a multimedia PC and AST’s first attempt to crack the consumer market.
Based around a 50MHz Cyrix chip, local bus, and double speed CD-ROM, the Advantage is capable of running some fairly hefty multimedia applications. The package includes well known Microsoft titles such as Encarta, Cinemania and Microsoft Works.
Using the storage capacities of the CD-ROM, the bundle also includes a disk titled AST Works. This disk contains all the original files and applications that shipped with the PC. With its accompanying floppy the system can be rebooted, the hard drive formatted and the original files copied from the CD-ROM — all automatically. This is ideal if the system encounters a virus or corrupted system files; you just pop the CD in the drive and start from scratch.
Built into AST Works is a new user
friendly front-end to Windows. When firing up the system for the first time you are greeted with a multimedia video clip of AST’s senior vice-president for sales and service, Jim Schraith. From here you are taken on a tour of the system based on your current level of PC knowledge.
These facilities are ideal for the often inexperienced home user who sees the PC as something scary sitting in the corner. For the more technical user, the PC is based around a Cyrix CPU with 8M of RAM. As shipped it did not include a secondary cache; this can easily be added at a later date. The system performed reasonably well with a DOSmark of 260.71.
The graphics subsystem is incorporated on a motherboard local bus and uses an ATI Mach 32 chipset with IM of fast video RAM. The Windows Graphics test recorded a result of 6.15 million WinMarks. Included with the system is a 15in AST Vision 5L monitor.
For disk storage the system uses a Western Digital Caviar drive with 330M of storage and a local bus IDE controller. This combination faired reasonably in the Windows disk tests with a score of 418 Win-Marks.
The 16-bit SoundBlaster card is capable of CD-quality reproduction in both mono and stereo modes. Hardware includes an external microphone and amplified Labtec speakers. This is coupled to a double speed Sony CD-ROM unit.
When it comes to upgrading, the system can accommodate two additional 5.25in externally accessible drives and has five vacant 16-bit ISA slots. The motherboard uses four 72-pin SIMM sockets to provide memory storage. Only two of these are occupied and the system can be upgraded to contain a maximum of 64M.