Peripherals Plus DX4/100

For its clock-tripled 1 OOM Hz model, Peripherals Plus elected a VESA local bus motherboard in a mini-tower case. Memory came in the form of 8M of SIMMs, in a two 4M SIMM arrangement leaving two empty SIMM slots. Cache memory’ came to 256K of speedy 15ns SRAM. The CPU was placed in the lower front part of the motherboard. A heat sink and fan raised the profile of the chip and its mounting socket to block no less than four of the ISA slots al the rear of the Ixxird from using a full-length expansion card. One ISA slot was left free of this concern.
There were two VESA local bus slots which were both put to gcxxJ use. One held the Number Nine GXE64 graphics adaptor, a less well-appointed brother to the Pro version of the card, but still packing a punch with its 2M of video RAM and 64-bit S3 accelerator chipset. Tire other VLB device was a real value-adder to the system, a SIDEjr Plus multi I/O card. This catered for the floppy drive and has a clever fast Enhanced IDE controller for the Conner CF54O drive pumping throughput at a rated 1 IKps.
The SIDEjr has an onboard EPROM BIOS chip, the brains behind the board. When the BIOS kicks in on boot a press of the FIO key will activate the card’s nonvolatile configuration utility. You then have control to enable the enhanced features and other aspects of the card without any need for a software utility program, jumpering or otherwise going under the hood. Another feature is the twin highspeed serial ports regulated by a 16550 UART. A different version of the card comes with an enhanced parallel port but we did not see it on this occasion.
In keeping with the need to lx; politically correct tlx* SIS chipset and Award BIOS compliments the ‘green’ capabilities of the Asustek motherboard. Storage needs are handled by two 5.25in external and three 3.5in drive bays. One of the 35in bays, slung in popular fashion under the main 5.25in cage, is internal and contains the Conner drive. Using all bays would be virtually impossible — there would lx; a very tight squeeze between the floppy and hand disk. Only a slimline lialf-height drive could be used and any pan of the drive’s circuit board protruding out would lx* disaster.
The performance of this model based on 486/VESA technology emphasises the maturity of the design parameters for the 486 family of processors. This system, for a bargain $3275, allowed (he flashy GXE64 card the freedom to unshackle itself and run true to form. Tire good Windows score of 21.63 million graphics WinMarks is close enough to Focal Point Computing’s (the local distributors for Number Nine) estimation of the GXE64, which is just about terminal velocity for this adaptor on the VESA bus. In spite of the hoopla of the PCI mezzanine bus, VESA remains king in the 486 stakes at least for the moment. Unfortunately, nothing led us to suggest that better day’s lie ahead for the disk subsystem which was sluggish across all tests but, with half a gigabyte of the stuff, one certainly can’t complain on quantity grounds.
The 230-watt power supply, without the idle systems in play, should handle all but the most exacting tasks expected of a standalone PC workstation. Peripherals Plus’ offer of DOS 6.21, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and a three-year return to base warranty, puts this machine in the middle of the pack for features. For the budget market, the Peripherals Plus looks a ‘don’t miss it’ buy.