Product Reviews

AMD is gearing up for another of its perennial bouts with Intel, no doubt heartened by the success of its Athlon range. The latest assault on Intel's dominance in the processor market began with the June launch of AMD's Duron processor (reviewed p155), which it sees as an alternative to the Celeron for the value desktop. However, one step up from the current mainstream Athlon desktop processor is the Thunderbird, appearing in sample quantities at the time of writing. Panrix had its Magnum 650T system round to PC Pro before the paint was dry.

The Thunderbird reference may be AMD's knowing nod to American boomer generation, but what you've actually got under the hood is an Athlon, which now has a 256Kb on-die Level 2 cache just like the current crop of Flip Chip Pentium IIIs.

The Panrix Magnum puts a 650MHz Thunderbird together with a MicroStar Slot A motherboard bearing the usual AMD 750 glue logic with the rudimentary allocation of 128Mb of PC100 SDRAM. Although both Thunderbirds and Durons will be migrating to socket-based technology, to use up existing parts this socket-based Thunderbird has been packaged into a Slot A cartridge. Panrix has gone large on the hard disk front and opted for a 30Gb Maxtor drive spinning at 7,200rpm. Although formatted under Windows to 28.6Gb, this still ought to see you through the foreseeable future.

One of the Magnum's bonus features is its combination DVD/CD-R/CD-RW drive, which puts together a fairly slow quad-speed DVD player with a CD-R/CD-RW on one tray in one bay. Of course the option for direct CD copies will elude you with resorting to hard disk imaging more of a hit-and-miss affair.

Panrix's attractive proposition has been to supply this impressive kit at a surprisingly low £1,099 price point. The list of goodies includes an internal Diamond SupraExpress

ADVERTISEMENT

56i Pro voice/fax modem, and a 19in monitor. Hansol's FST display provides impressively sharp detail at 1,152 x 864, which is about the optimum resolution for this tube size, but held up well enough for practical use at 1,280 x 1,024. Both modes are supported at a stable-looking 85Hz vertical refresh, and the picture was bright without glare.

The OSD controls cover the geometry options well with the usual choice of preset colour temperatures or a roll-your-own mode, although this wasn't clearly or intuitively implemented. The physical interface of the controls consisted of a rotate and click-recessed dial, which was difficult to turn, resulting in pressing too hard and clicking unintentionally.

The Magnum's keyboard is excellent; a full-sized Fujitsu with a solid metal baseplate and a crisp mechanical action. The Panrix comes with a reasonable grade of sound system too, consisting of a Sound Blaster Live! Player 1024 and a 4.1 Cambridge SoundWorks FourPointSurround speaker array. This is capable of perfectly acceptable audio quality and makes more than enough noise if you turn it up. Although it's a channel short of the full 5.1 Dolby Digital experience, it does a decent enough job with immersive games' soundtracks.

Although nVIDIA's GeForce 256 graphics chipset is still flavour of the month, Panrix has kitted the Magnum out with a 32Mb Guillemot Maxi Gamer Cougar card using the nVIDIA TNT2 M64 accelerator. This cutback lends itself heavily to the affordable price. And since the AMD 750 chipset only supports AGP 2x, the resulting drop from 4x is less noticeable performance-wise.

The Guillemot 3D Prophet GeForce 256 card used in the Mesh Matrix 700GDR (A-Listed, issue 69, p140) actually did slightly better in the graphics benchmarks. The overall results were all but identical however, showing the speed boost you get from the Thunderbird's on-die cache was enough to make up for this and to catch up with the faster 700MHz straight Athlon powering the Mesh.

This puts the Magnum in a pretty strong position, since it's very well specified for the price and, with two memory sockets, four PCI slots and two front-opening drive bays (one of each size) free for expansion, it has plenty of potential too. While companies like Mesh and Panrix are turning out Athlon-based machines as good as these, for this kind of money there's no reason for Intel to have it all its own way.