mlord@bmers58.UUCP (Mark Lord) (09/05/89)
Hands-On Review Of Micro-Generation 386sx I recently purchased a 386sx by phone from Micro-Generation (New Jersey). Here is the complete story for those who might also be interested. At the time of purchase, they appeared to have the best "deal" in the July/August Computer Shopper: System board: 16Mhz 386sx running at 20Mhz with heatsink 20Mhz motherboard using C&T NEAT-SX chipset 2 Megabytes of page/interleave DRAM (80 ns) for near 0 waits Room for up to 4 Megabytes total DRAM on board The rest: 1:1 interleaving 2HD+2FD controller by DTK 1.2 Meg CHINON floppy drive 230 watt power supply full size AT-style case, 3 external drive slots, 2 internal enhanced 101 keyboard with "Northgate click & feel" 1 year warranty (Continental Tech.) (monographics card (herc compatible) with mono monitor) Price: US$1299 + UPS shipping I ordered the above minus the video card & monitor for $1209 plus $35 for UPS. The shipping date was promised as 10 days later, with my VISA not being billed until the system actually shipped. Actual shipment date was 14 days from sale date, no big deal. However, there were a few irregularities with the system they actually sent to me: 1. System board: ** 16Mhz 386sx running at 18Mhz with heatsink ** 20Mhz motherboard using Intel 82335 chipset, AWARD BIOS ** 2 Megabytes of page mode DRAM, using 2 1-meg SIPPs (70ns) ** Room for up to 8 Megabytes total DRAM, using 4 SIPPs & 36 chips, all SIPPs and chips must be of same size (256K or 1Meg). 2. The rest: ** 1:1 interleaving 2HD+2FD controller by EVEREX 1.2 Meg CHINON floppy drive ** 200 watt power supply full size AT-style case, 3 external drive slots, 2 internal enhanced 101 keyboard with "Northgate click & feel" ** AT I/O card with 2-serial 1-printer dual-joystick ports I have put a double asterisk ** beside each component that differed from those actually ordered. On the whole I am more pleased with what I got than I might have been with the original items, though it does perturb me somewhat. The Intel ChipSet and matching AWARD BIOS are excellent, and don't exhibit any of the problems with shadowing that net.people have been discussing re:AWARD. I prefer the 18Mhz over 20Mhz clock speed for reliability reasons. The board requires all DRAM banks to be filled (8 Meg!) before it can use interleaved accesses to attain full performance, and it currently crawls along at a Norton SI of 18.4, about the same as most 16Mhz 386SX systems. The unadvertised AT I/O card was a nice touch, making up for the weaker power supply. The supply itself seems to handle my two floppy drives and two hard drives without complaint so far. I have also installed a Paradise VGA16+ (with NEC MS II monitor) and an Everex RAM3000 board with 3Meg of 120ns RAM. The BIOS/ChipSet were even clever enough to not map the unused shadow RAM over top of my Everex board when I configured the board to start at 2048K. I now have the board beginning at 2432K to allow use of the extra 384K with the shadowing turned off (I use QEMM for shadowing because of finer granularity). The CHINON drive could not read some of my older 360K disks, so I swapped it with the Fujitsu drive from my old AT (no problems reading/writing 360K). I had a problem with parity errors on the DRAM for a while, but it seems to have been fixed by reseating the SIPPs VERY FIRMLY on the motherboard. I use MS-DOS 3.3 plus DESQVIEW 386 (with QEMM) as the operating environment, and the system seems to zip along quite well with 5Meg of DRAM. -Mark