forrest@sybase.com (03/29/89)
Last week I posted a summary of the 386 clone I was going to buy.
To summarize, I got a
DataExpert 386 motherboard (C&T chipset, 20 MHZ 386, 387 and
Weitek support, upto 8Megs of memory on the motherboard,
25 MHZ Turbo Mode, AMI BIOS)
4 Megs of Memory (36 80-nsec Siemens 1 Mbit chips)
Adaptec 2322 ESDI controller
Fujitsu 150 Mbyte ESDI disk
Maxiswitch 101 key keyboard
Teac 1.2 Mbyte floppy
I/O card (1 serial, 1 parallel, 1 game)
All this for $3079 (!!) which is a great price. As I pointed out,
I got the last of the Fuji ESDI disks HQ had in stock so don't expect to
get a similar system.
Well, last Saturday I drove down to Sunnyvale to pick up the system.
HQ is what I expect is a typical clone house. It has a front office
where there are desks and some demo systems. The rest of the place
is a large room where all the systems are assembled. There were about
10 systems in the process of being put together and tested. Although
HQ uses many Taiwanese components, they also have a fair number of
name brand components, such as NEC, Fuji, Adaptec, DTC, Siemens,
and others. (I've found that most Taiwanese components these days
are pretty good and don't consider them a major drawback.)
My system was set up and ready when I arrived. I had asked them to
leave it open so I could take a look inside and also so I could
put in a Hercules clone board I had been using in the XT clone
I'm getting rid of. One minor problem that came up right away was
that my Hercules clone board was slightly too long for the 8 bit
slots in the HQ system. The same board fit fine in my Leading Edge
Model M. However, I was able to put it in by not putting one end
in the edge director. The board works fine this way. I don't consider
this to be an HQ problem. The hard drive was setup as 5 32 Mbyte
partitions. I don't know what I'm going to do with all this diskspace.
I ran the CORETEST program which showed a 25msec seek time and a
data transfer rate of 1Mbyte/sec. Needless to say, I'm extremely pleased
with this disk drive.
After getting home I ran all the software I had been running on my old
PC and everything ran fine. I'm using the RAMDRIVE.SYS ram disk and
the PC-Kwik disk cache running in extended memory. Having a 1 Mbyte
disk cache and ram disk is great! Compiling and linking the BGIDEMO.C
program in Turbo C (~1500 lines) takes about 3 seconds. I'll be
running other benchmarks to see how the system compares with other
386 clones. I don't have any of the Unix versions for the 386 so
I have no idea how (or if) Unix works on my system. I'm going
to wait for S5R4 before buying Unix for it.
Everybody at HQ was very nice and professional. I had especially good
dealings with Echo Tsai, the salesperson I dealt with. She seemed very
honest and interested in making sure I got what I wanted and was happy.
My only concerns now are:
The technician, in response to my question, told me that the
AMI BIOS was the latest rev (2/89). However, various utilities
tell me that the BIOS is dated 9/88. I don't know if this
is important. I think the technician just made a mistake.
So far, everything seems to run just fine.
I am concerned about any damage that could occur to any of
the 20 MHZ components on the motherboard when they are run at
25 Mhz. What I'll do about this until I find out for sure is
to keep the system running at 20 MHZ until I'm doing something
CPU intensive. I'll certainly keep it at 20 MHZ when I've left
the computer running while I'm doing something else.
Although I've had a very positive experience in dealing with
HQ, I'm worried about getting problems fixed on the motherboard
should HQ go out of business (which I very much hope they don't).
Although the board uses the Chips and Technology chipset, who
knows how standard everything else is. I did look at a motherboard
and noticed that there were no jumper wires which is a good
sign. I do wish I had more information about the C&T setup
program that you can run when you boot up.
Since they don't have any more Fuji disk drives, should something
happen to mine I'm not sure what they would replace mine with.
With the possible exception of the first item, I already knew about
all these problems before I bought my system, so I don't consider them
HQ's fault. As of now, none of these are very serious.
HQ Computers is at 485 Macara Ave., Suite 904, in Sunnyvale.
Their phone number is 408-245-5836. I have no connection with them
of any kind other than as a customer. Based on my experiences with
them so far I wouldn't hesitate to do business with them again.
Jon Forrest
forrest@sybase.com
{pacbell,pyramid,sun,{uunet,ucbvax}!mtxinu}!sybase!forrest
415-596-3422phil@diablo.amd.com (Phil Ngai) (03/30/89)
In article <3546@sybase.sybase.com> forrest@sybase.com writes: |Last week I posted a summary of the 386 clone I was going to buy. <description deleted> We bought almost exactly the same system, and dealt with the same person (Echo). The price is very attractive and the system works very well. |386 clones. I don't have any of the Unix versions for the 386 so |I have no idea how (or if) Unix works on my system. I'm going |to wait for S5R4 before buying Unix for it. We run Interactive Unix and it seems to work. | I am concerned about any damage that could occur to any of | the 20 MHZ components on the motherboard when they are run at | 25 Mhz. What I'll do about this until I find out for sure is I think you've been listening to people who don't know what they're talking about. It is true that most chips run hotter when they are clocked faster. It is not true that a chip rated at 20 MHz and run at 25 MHz will have a shorter life than a chip rated at 25 and run at 25. It is true that a chip rated at 20 and run at 25 may not be reliable at 25. But if you run that chip at 25 and find it doesn't work at 25, that chip will not have been damaged and will run just as well at 20 as it ever did. This seems to be another urban legend. -- Phil Ngai, phil@diablo.amd.com {uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil "In California, the reward for saving water is a lower quota."