Microtel, the company that supplies Wal-Mart with PCs without an operating system pre-installed, kindly sent us in one of their models for a review. They sent us a Microtel SYSMAR511, which consists of an 1.4 GHz AthlonXP 1600+, 256 MB DDR memory, MSI motherboard and a 40 GB ATA-100 Samsung hard drive. Read more on how the PC performed under Linux, Windows and BeOS.MicroTel informed me that they were sending me an AthlonXP 1600+ and three days later, I indeed received the machine (that was two weeks ago). I (naturally :) rushed to plug it in, but to my dismay the BIOS was reporting that the machine was running only on 1050 Mhz, not on 1400 (an AthlonXP 1600+ runs at 1400 Mhz). A quick look at the MSI's web site revealed that there is a jumper to change the speed of the front side bus. The jumper was set for 100MHz FSB, instead of 133, hence the lower clock speed. Ten minutes after we received the machine, you could see us with a screwdriver in our hands, opening the case and correcting the jumper setting. After that, indeed, the machine ran perfectly at 1400 Mhz, and the BIOS was correctly recognizing it as an AthlonXP 1600+. The friendly people over at MicroTel apologized for the oversight, which happened because they were testing the machine with various settings before they send it over to us for the review.
The box that contains the computer includes all the manuals you will need, plus CDs with drivers and even a printed paper on how to configure the modem to work under Red Hat 7.2. MicroTel has recently changed the kind of modem they were supplying in the past for their products, in order to offer a Linux compatible one.
The machine comes with a very fast, 52x-Max LG CD-Rom, a floppy drive, a cute mini-tower case, a PCI modem, a set of speakers, a 104-keys keyboard, a 3-button KeyTronic mouse with a wheel, an MSI motherboard (MS-6390-L v1.0) which features the VIA KM266 chipset. The motherboard features an onboard RTL8139 network card, AC97/8233A VIA sound and south bridge, and also integrated you will find the fastest S3 Savage model to date: S3 Savage4-PRO+ 266DDR. The graphics card comes pre-configured to use 16 MB of your main 256 MB of PC-2100 DDR memory. The hard drive is an IDE SV4012H Samsung 40 GB, ATA-100 5400 RPM with a 14.9 msec disk access time.
I am obliged to say and write that the hard drive business, is a weird one. I mean, I tried to find information about the specific model (SV4012H) at Google, and all I could find was only 4-5 web sites carrying tests or news about this specific model. And curiously enough, it seems that this drive was only available for purchase in... Ukraine. The SamsungElectronics site does not have any information whatsoever about this drive, not even in their archives. Check some benchmarks here (sorry, everything is in Ukrainian). However, so far, the drive has performed adequately and as advertised for me, with no problems whatsoever.
When the machine starts, there is a network card deamon that runs right after the initialization of the PC. It tries to figure out DHCP. However, this "feature" is truly a very annoying one for me, because it postpones the booting of the machine for about 30 seconds. Our internal network here is not DHCP-based, but each machine requests the IP address from our main FreeBSD server instead. Therefore, the daemon stalls trying to get DHCP to connect. Unfortunately, I still haven't found a way to turn this "daemon" off in the BIOS.
- "The Hardware"
- "Windows, Linux, BeOS and Conclusion"
