mjg@ecsvax.UUCP (Michael Gingell) (02/26/86)
Join the Stamp out Redundant Lines Committee here. I have been looking at the rash of adds in the latest PC Tech Journal and Byte showing all kinds of speed up boards for the PC and XT. Most use the Intel 80286 processor. Some are full cards with the capability of going to 1 or more Megs of memory. Some are half cards with just the basic processor, a socket for a coprocessor and some miscellaneous logic plus possibly some cache memory. Some of the adds. make wild or misleading claims. It seems reasonable to me that you could get 30% faster than an AT if you run the 286 faster and if you have on board 16 bit wide fast memory. However Victor Technologies for instance has a half card and their add in the March 86 issue of Byte (page 165) claims it can make your PC function 600 % faster. Typically, they don't say faster than what or under what conditions this 'can' happen or whether it will happen all the time. Here are some of the different products I noted and the claims extracted from the adds. If anyone will send me their direct experiences I would be most grateful and I will summarize for the net. Victor Technologies 800-248-5252 SpeedPac 286 $795 ($595 till 3/31) 'can make your PC function 600% faster' Univation 408-745-0180 Turbocharger $? 'Your PC will do everything it did before only 300% faster' PC Technologies 800-821-3086 x100 286 Express Card $795 '200-600% speedup' (with 80287 ?) Classic Technology Corp 408-434-9333 286 Speed Pack '33% faster than the AT' Seattle Telecom & Data 206-883-8440 PC-286 Card '123 runs 3 times as fast as on XT' Phoenix Computer Products 800-344-7200 Pfaster 286 '60% faster than AT' Quadram 404-923-6666 Quadsprint 'less than $600' probably 599.95! 'Virtually as fast as an IBM AT' (Real Estate for half as fast?) Earth Computers 714-964-5784 Turbo Accel-286 < $1000 '5 times faster than PC' Personal experience on these or any others welcome, Mike Gingell ...decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!mjg