jk@utastro.UUCP (John Krist) (09/01/88)
During the summer, I replaced my old IBM PC with an Arche Rival 386 machine. Since I haven't seen any reviews of this particular machine in the press, I thought I might give a little review of my own, to help any who may be interested in this machine. My configuration is as follows : o 20 Mhz clock speed ( uses a 16 Mhz 80386 that's push up, but this seems to cause no problems ) o 16 Mhz 80387 ( can accept 80287, and 16 or 20 Mhz 80387 ) o 2 Mb interleaved, 32 bit ram ( refresh time unknown ) (expandable to 16 Megs using 32-bit memory cards) o Phoenix BIOS o 1.2 Mb 5.25-inch floppy and 1.44 Mb 3.5-inch floppy o 40 Mb Seagate 251-1 drive (28 ms) o 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port Equipment brought over from my old PC includes a Compaq VGA card (16-bit), a Zenith flat screen monitor, a 1200-baud internal modem, and a Microsoft serial mouse. The Rival comes with a Hercules compatible card (some systems come with a monochrome monitor). Let me go over this topic by topic : o Construction : The board is nicely laid out and has a low chip count ( they seem to use every chip that Chip & Technologies has put out ). However, the i/o ports are placed on a card, so there goes a slot. Two 32-bit slots, 4 16-bit and 2 8-bit slots are there, with the memory taking up one 32 bit slot. The bus runs at 10 Mhz ( the cpu is switchable, 10 or 20 Mhz ). There is only space for 3 half-height drives ( so my machine is full). The case is compact ( it takes up less desk space than my old PC ). Overall, it seems to be well built ( built in the USA, no less ). ( As you can tell, I'm addicted to parentheses. ) o Performance : Of course, anything would seem faster than my old PC, but the Rival seems to cruise nicely. I haven't run any tough benchmarks, but for what it's worth, Norton's SI gives a 23 and a Chips and Technologies speed check ( which I got from somewhere else ) said it was 1.3 times faster than a Compaq 16-Mhz 386, which is about right for the increased clock speed. The setup program has the usual shadowing of ROM into RAM for both the BIOS and the EGA (the EGA shadowing didn't work with my VGA card, so I disabled it). The Seagate runs nicely, eventhough I know it's not state of the art and may develop temperature problems in the future, as others have warned ( nothing could be worse than my PC's Seagate 225 ). I've been using the FLASH disk caching software, using 1 MB of extended ram. I haven't had any trouble with the 1.44 Mb 3.5-inch drives. I have heard that some manufacturers' disk control cards don't work well with these drives, but the Rival's does. I mostly use Microsoft's QuickC for my software development, and it runs like a rocket on this machine. And for you game players, the new Flight Simulator is wonderful on a fast machine. Deluxe Paint II is also very fast. o Documentation and Support The documentation is so-so. There's a spiral bound book which shows how to set up the thing and a myriad of booklets meant to be placed in an IBM-like binder which describe the i/o card, setup software, display card, and the included LIM expanded memory emulator. I did have a problem at first with some floating-point operations crashing. Looking in the documentation I found a jumper which sets the 387 speed to either the cpu speed or something called "Oscillator 3." I called up Arche (using their 800 number) and was put in touch with tech support (which includes the guys who actually built the thing). It seems I was running my 80387 at 20 Mhz instead of 16, and it was tripping over itself. "Oscillator 3", it seems, is 16 Mhz. Changing the jumper solved the problem. They mentioned that all of the 16 Mhz 387s they tested worked at 20, so I just got a weak one (My chip was bought from the store, not through Arche). In all, the support is very good in my opinion (none of this stupid pay-for-support junk that some other companies charge). The warranty is two-years, a big plus. Also, they are arranging for on-site servicing, but I have not called them back up to find out what is going on now. o Price : I got my machine (without the stuff I previously had) for a total of $4300, include California tax. The base system itself was $3000. I purchased it from Computer Lane in Canoga Park, CA, while I was out there, and they did some discounting, so check around. Any questions - just give me a note. John Krist CCD Detector Lab U. of Texas Astronomy Dept jk@utastro.UUCP {allegra,ihnp4}!{noao,ut-sally}!utastro!jk jk@astro.AS.UTEXAS.EDU