clear@actrix.co.nz (Charlie Lear) (03/16/90)
Follows complete text of my review of the ALR PowerFlex Plus published
in the February 1990 Computing Today magazine. Hopefully it answers a
few questions that have been brought up on the net about the PowerFlex
Plus. There may be detail differences between the New Zealand model
supplied by Advanced Logic Distributors Ltd. and models supplied in
other countries.
Article (C)1990 Charles J. Lear, Ariel Publishing Co.
Recently I had the privilege of reviewing the ALR PowerFlex Plus
computer.
The PowerFlex Plus is a mini-desktop AT, with a 16MHz 80286 processor,
a fast 40MB hard disk, 1MB of on-board RAM and a special expansion
socket.
The socket allows you to plug in a daughtercard carrying either an
Intel 80386SX-16 processor, or the new powerhouse chip: Intel's
80486-25.
I tested the machine with all three processors.
What is interesting about the PowerFlex Plus is not its speed, but its
ease of configuration and sheer versatility. In this regard, the
PowerFlex Plus is unmatched by any other desktop PC.
Because the ALR can be considered to be three separate PC's in the
same case, I have judged each configuration on its merits and rated
them individually. Let's start with a "bare box" configuration, and
work our way up the performance/price scale.
ALR POWERFLEX PLUS BASE SYSTEM
This is the basic unit, and is the "base machine" on which you add
extras for speed or convenience.
Even in its standard trim, the PowerFlex Plus is no slug. It has a
16MHz 80286 processor, a megabyte of fast RAM, and a fast Western
Digital 40 megabyte hard disk drive. One 3.5", 1.44MB floppy disk
drive is standard. The manual refers throughout to a 12MHz
processor in the PowerFlex Plus, but there is no difference in the
new model other than a 25% speed increase.
The review machine was supplied with a VGA card and TECO colour
monitor.
Unpacking and setting up the computer was simple. The box is well
protected with a foam moulding containing the system unit. The
manual and system disk was in a pocket underneath, and the keyboard
sat in a recess on top.
The ALR is a pleasing shade of beige, with an attractive and
uncluttered front panel containing the on-off switch, two 5.25" drive
blanking plates and the 3.5" drive mounted vertically at the right
hand end.
UNDER THE HOOD
Getting into the PowerFlex Plus is a breeze. Instead of the
conventional five Philips screws securing the case, there is a
human-sized knurled screw in each corner at the rear of the machine.
Top marks to ALR for a simple, but effective, design.
Slide the case forward for about an inch, then lift it straight up.
The innards of the PowerFlex Plus are very well laid out. The 3.5",
40MB hard disk drive is mounted on its side, attached to the right
hand side of the system power supply. Directly in front of the power
supply is the cage for two half-height 5.25" devices, with the 3.5"
floppy disk drive mounted on the right. Cables run from the two
drives to the on-board controllers, and from the power supply to the
on/off switch.
Five 16-bit slots (one filled with the video card) are at the rear.
Behind the power supply are the D25 connectors for the serial and
parallel ports.
In the middle left of the motherboard are four SIMM sockets for memory
expansion. Directly to the right of the SIMM sockets and next to the
disk cage is ALR's Feature Connector. This uses a small-pitch edge
connector that looks remarkably Micro Channel-like, and is where the
80386SX and 80486 modules plug in.
Access and layout both rate as best in class. For expansion, the
number of free slots gained by the use of on-board floppy and hard
disk controllers, and the ability to use off-the-shelf SIMM modules
for 4MB of extended memory, make the ALR an excellent choice.
GETTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Advanced Logic Distributors, the NZ importers of the ALR range,
leave individual machine configuration up to their dealers and
VAR's. This allows an extremely wide range of options when
purchasing a system, but you need to be sure you get your money's
worth.
The review machine came with a 16-bit VGA card with the Paradise
chipset. This rates well for compatibility and speed, but the fact
that the card had only 256k of memory and no sockets for expansion
means that you cannot get 800 by 600 resolution, or 640 by 480 in
256 colours. Pay a little more and get a VGA card with 512k of RAM.
Advanced Logic supplied a TECO brand colour VGA monitor, and said
that monitor choice was left up to their individual dealers. When
purchasing a monitor for VGA, be sure to see it connected to your
particular computer before handing over any money.
The TECO had substandard convergence, meaning the edges of the letters
were quite fuzzy and sometimes hard to read. There was also a
noticeable bow in the left hand edge of the screen. It did not,
however, have any purity errors (blue, green or red tinges on parts of
the screen). With the continued fall in price of high quality VGA
monitors, you do not have to settle for less than a very good display.
I had no complaints with the 40MB Western Digital hard disk drive at
all. It was fast, quiet, and had a respectable data transfer rate.
Fitting a second drive was quite well detailed in the manual.
For users requiring higher capacity, Advanced Logic can supply a
Connor 100MB drive. An alternative would be to remove the 40MB disk,
disable the on-board controller, and fit a hard disk drive into the
spare 5.25" bays. Maximum capacity with current technology would be
in the region of 350MB using one half-height device, or 1.2GB using a
full-height drive.
PERFORMANCE
For someone used to using 386 machines, the speed of the base
PowerFlex Plus was a pleasant surprise. The standard hard disk is very
well matched to the rest of the system, and there are no disk or
memory bottlenecks.
Compiling a large PASCAL program with intensive disk access took
just on 23 seconds. Compiling the same program to memory took nearly
six seconds.
All the standard benchmarks returned figures that were either normal
or above normal for this class and type of machine.
For most users, the 80286-based PowerFlex Plus could be all the
machine they would ever use. With the Feature Connector's ability to
take an 80386SX or 80486 expansion, the PowerFlex Plus could be all
the machine they would ever need.
AIN'T NO SUBSTITUTE FOR CUBES
Likewise, in computing terms there is no subsitute for a more
powerful processor.
The 80386SX expansion unit comes in a small box, well padded, with a
very informative instruction booklet. The processor is on a small
card with a few support chips. A socket for the optional 80387SX
math coprocessor dwarfs the rest of the components.
Installation could not have been easier.
Lift the monitor off the system unit and place it to one side. Undo
the four knurled screws at the back of the machine and lift off the
cover. Making sure you are well grounded, remove the 80386SX module
from its anti-static package and push it into the Feature Connector.
Make sure the mains power lead is not resting on the card, put the
case back on, and switch on.
You now have a 16MHz 80386SX computer!
There really is only one real reason for upgrading from the base AT
configuration to the 80386SX processor, and that is to run software
designed to take advantage of an 80386. Having a 16-bit data bus,
the SX is not disdvantaged in any way by the 16-bit on-board memory
of the PowerFlex Plus.
Benchmarking revealed the SX to be slightly slower than the base AT
in some respects, and slightly faster in others. These differences
are too small to be noticed in the real world of running
applications as opposed to benchmarks.
I was anxious to use the power of the SX module so I fitted four 1
megabyte SIMM modules, to take the machine to it maximum on-board
memory of 5MB. I encountered major problems getting the machine to
recognise the extra RAM, and in desperation rang Advanced Logic's
freephone number for some technical advice. The cure was as simple
as plugging in the SX module; merely go through the setup routine to
disable the memory between 640k and 1M. I rebooted and the machine
performed flawlessly. That is one small detail that needs to be
included in the manual, even if it is on a separate piece of paper
or in a README on the system diskette.
Microsoft Windows 386 installed first time, and worked quite happily
with the Super 5 optical mouse connected to the serial port.
Ami Professional and Excel installed equally simply, and the SX
swapped between applications with the greatest of ease. The only
tradeoff between the SX and a full-blown 80386 is speed of memory
access. In the PowerFlex Plus the 16-bit memory nullifies any
advantage in fitting the more powerful (and expensive) processor.
The PASCAL test program compiled in 23.5 seconds to disk, and 5.5
seconds to memory.
These results beg the question, what is the advantage in shelling
out cash for a processor upgrade that doesn't actually increase
performance to a huge degree?
Really, the only advantage is in being able to run 386-specific
software. A larger number of applications include code to detect and
make use of the extra 80386 instructions, and the SX handles all of
these with ease. Currently, anybody wanting a Windows environment
would be well advised to buy the SX module for the advantages that
hardware expanded memory management and multi-tasking that come with
Windows 386. OS/2 will also benefit from being run on the SX.
DesqView 386 allows up to nine application windows to be running
simultaneously on the SX, whereas only two may be running on the AT.
Already, we are starting to see programs that either require an
80386 processor or include alternative 386 versions of the software.
This trend will accelerate in the next couple of years, making AT's
obsolete in a business market. The PowerFlex Plus is in the unique
position of being quickly and simply upgraded to meet that software
head-on.
POWER TO BURN
At last the 80486 upgrade module arrived. In a box very similar to
the SX module, it too was well covered in foam and had an enclosed
instruction booklet.
Familiar with the procedure by now, I whipped the cover off, removed
the SX module and plugged in the 80486 card. There is one thing
immediately noticeable about anything with an 80486 in it: the size
of the chip.
In simple terms, the 80486 processor is huge. It is almost two
inches square, made of thick ceramic materials and has more pins
than the average hedgehog {porcupine}. It is only fitting and proper
that a chip as powerful and fast as the 486 should come in a big package.
It would be a real disappointment and marketing suicide if it didn't!
Switching on the PowerFlex Plus revealed nothing abnormal. It booted
properly, and sat there with the normal prompt, waiting for a
command. I tentatively ran Norton's SysInfo (SI) program.
The PowerFlex Plus contemptuously scrolled the information screen,
and hardly paused as it spat a 41.0 rating at me. I half expected a
message telling me to stop trifling and to run a proper test on it.
The 486-based PowerFlex Plus treated almost all other benchmarks
with similar disdain. Using the latest PC Magazine benchmarks, the
PowerFlex Plus averaged almost 50% faster than a PS/2 80386 running
at 25MHz. Some operations were almost the same speed. Integer
operations were over twice as fast as the 386. Floating point
benchmarks showed the 486's true nature: the onboard floating point
unit and cache returned performance over three times that of a 25MHz
80386 fitted with an 80387 math co-processor.
Suitably amazed, I started running some "real-world" applications.
Processor intensive applications flew like I have never seen.
Graphics images were created almost instantly.
However, it was a different story with disk or memory-intensive
programs. The PASCAL compile test returned only 20.3 seconds for the
disk compile, and 4.0 seconds for a compilation to memory. That
indicated that the hard disk had become a serious bottleneck for the
processor, and that the 16-bit memory access was starting to slow
things down.
That is not a criticism of the machine; it is very well designed and
put together. But in any situation where you have installed a jet
engine in a standard sports car, you have to expect handling or fuel
problems. In the case of the PowerFlex Plus, disk access proves a
severely limiting factor, and the 16-bit memory access shows up as
fuel starvation; the memory just can't keep up with the 486.
Addressing these comments, Leigh Brotherston of Advanced Logic
Distributors in Auckland is resolute: anybody who is going to buy a
machine with an 80486 processor is not going to have a standard hard
drive. The 100MB Connor drive has a much better access time and
data transfer rate than the standard Western Digital drive.
"The PowerFlex Plus is not a file server," says Brotherston. "It was
never intended as such. We see the 486-equipped PowerFlex Plus as
being suitable for corporate spreadsheet work, as a high-end CAD
system and as an ideal unit for running 4GL accounting packages.
These are all processor-intensive tasks and the PowerFlex Plus excels
in these applications."
I agree entirely with those responses. In the hunt for things that
the PowerFlex Plus was good at, I obtained two graphics packages
which require a fair bit of computing power. One was a fractal
graphics generator, and the other was 3D graphics rendering program.
The results were interesting to say the least. Running FRACTINT,
images which took 75 seconds to create on a 20MHz 80386 with
coprocessor took just under 24 seconds on the PowerFlex Plus. This
bears out the benchmark given above, where integer arithmetic was
given as being twice as fast as a 25MHz 386.
Running DBW_RENDER, the ray-tracing program, provided more
surprises. Images which took 100 seconds per line to generate on the
386 took between one and a half and four seconds on the 486. Those
results are stunning. I ran two other data files through the
program, in case there had been some error. The same performance
improvement was apparent. I can only put this down to the
lightning-quick floating point unit and cache built into the
processor chip.
Despite being far more power than most computer users would ever
want or need, the 80486-powered PowerFlex Plus is incredibly
addictive. It has taken a couple of weeks for my chronic attack of
the "gimmes" to subside. You get used to things happening instantly,
and it was a real heart-tug to reformat the hard disk and box the
machine up again.
WHO WILL BUY?
In its intended role as a low-cost graphics workstation, as a
high-end CAD machine or 4GL engine, ALR must surely have the market
sewn up with the PowerFlex Plus 486. It is by far the cheapest
80486-based system in the world, and when the prices of 486 chips
fall (as they must, with increased manufacturing capacity) the
PowerFlex Plus must be seen as the ideal corporate upgrade vehicle.
A lot of companies have lost a lot of money by buying the latest and
greatest hardware, only to lose out when something bigger and faster
comes along. Now businesses can afford to buy a fast AT workstation,
secure in the knowledge that next year or the year after, their
machine can be upgraded in two minutes to the same level as the market
leaders.
The PowerFlex Plus also makes a lot of sense to companies wishing to
standardise on a PC hardware platform. The ALR's can be used at all
levels within a corporate structure, with each machine quickly
tailored to the needs of the individual using it.
With the PowerFlex Plus , ALR are also poised to make a significant
dent in the top end of home computers. The price of a PowerFlex Plus
is comparable to the Commodore PC40 Series III, and is not a great
deal more than the Amstrad PC2286. Neither competing machine offers
an upgrade path similar to the ALR, and the PowerFlex Plus runs 25%
faster in its basic trim.
The PowerFlex Plus has a comprehensive 12-month warranty, with
on-site service and extended maintenance contracts available.
There has to be a market opportunity for ALR dealers to approach
people who see the ALR brand name and proven support as being worth a
few extra dollars.
WHAT DOES IT ALL COST?
{All prices are in New Zealand dollars, app. USD$0.59 = NZD$1.00}
In its basic form, the PowerFlex Plus retails for $4995 plus GST.
That includes the hard disk and 1MB of RAM, but excludes video card
and monitor. As ALD says, the choice of monitor is best left to the
individual customer, and dealers may wish to offer packages that
offer better value by supplying a standard configuration.
The 80386SX upgrade module has a retail price of $1240 plus GST, and
the 80486 module weighs in at a whopping $8513 plus GST. Even so,
$15000 for a top end CAD machine is remarkably good value. Look for
the price of the 486 to fall dramatically in a year or so.
Memory upgrades are quoted at $600 plus GST per 1 megabyte module.
Individual ALR dealers may charge what they like, but be advised that
the PowerFlex Plus takes industry standard SIMM modules and if you pay
more than $280 plus GST per module you are being ripped off, shortage
or no shortage!
THE BOTTOM LINE
As an AT, the PowerFlex Plus is fast enough and cheap enough to give
Commodore a fright. As an SX, it is more expensive than a no-name
Taiwanese clone, but still comes in thousands under the price of an
IBM PS/2 55. As an 80486-powered rocket, there is nothing on the
market to compare.
Advanced Logic were at pains to point out that the PowerFlex Plus is
not suited to heavy file-server applications. Wait, they said, for
the new EISA and Micro Channel ALR 486's to be released towards the
end of March. They will feature huge expansion potential and promise
amazing number-crunching for real power users. Look out for our
review of these machines in coming months.
--
Charlie "The Bear" Lear: Call The Cave BBS, 64(4)643429 157MB Online!
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