Opus Power House K6-200

Given Opus' long standing in the business, I was rather surprised at the anonymity of the machine that arrived for review. Although the system unit came in a box printed up with the Opus livery, there was no badge on the case, nor was there one on the monitor or keyboard. The case itself was an unremarkable mini-tower with a cooling fan whose noise levels just about passed as acceptable.

The system is supplied with a Logitech Pilot two-button mouse which is smaller and less palm-filling than a Microsoft one, but perfectly adequate for its purpose. The keyboard is a sturdier-than-average narrow border unit with a fairly light action which was a bit hollow sounding, but again not cause for any serious complaint.

The pair of unnamed speakers weren't very impressive, with a slightly muffled quality lacking both deep bass and a clear top end, but they did score well for being powered directly from the back of the PC by a special DC output rather than via a bulky, often inconvenient, external power supply.

The monitor had a 15in FST screen which produced a fairly typical image diagonal of 13.5in. The picture was beset by a horrible 60Hz flicker, and there was no obvious way of correcting the problem since no graphics driver disk was supplied with the machine. In the end I selected 'Optimal' for the refresh rate in Display Properties, then lied to Windows about which monitor was connected - picking something fairly high-powered usually gets you a nice 85Hz vertical refresh. This was all a bit of a shame, as the tube itself can support refresh rates up to a super-stable 110Hz at 800 x 600 resolution. Image quality was average, mainly due to a slight lack of focus, and there's no computational sleight of hand for fixing this.

There's a reasonable amount of drive expansion on offer, with two front-opening 5.25in bays above the 12-speed Acer CD-ROM and two internal 3.5in spaces at the bottom of the stack, below the floppy drive. Sensibly, the 2.5Gb Maxtor EIDE hard disk has been mounted under the power supply to keep it out of the way.

As far as expansion slots go, the top two PCI slots should take more or less any size of card, but the next free PCI slot down is cut to half-length by the processor, as is the ISA slot next to it - they also share a single backplate cut-out. The bottom free ISA slot will take a two-thirds length card.

Although the Opus is based on a TX motherboard, EDO RAM has been used and the pair of SDRAM DIMM sockets beside the full bank of 72-pin sockets is left empty. The USB pin-out on the motherboard is unused and joins the empty DIMMs in mute reproach. The Cirrus Logic GD5446-based graphics card isn't exactly an exciting choice and clearly not one aimed at the games or serious graphics user, but it comes with its full complement of 2Mb of memory so you can get 24-bit colour at 800 « 600 resolution.

The 16-bit Serenade FM synthesis sound card based on a Crystal audio processor also failed to get the pulse racing and tied in with the impression created by the rest of the machine of a basic, low-cost approach aimed at producing the minimum acceptable product. Still, you do get a modem that offers 33.6Kbits/sec data transfer and the usual 14.4Kbits/sec fax capability, both of which are well worth having as a part of any PC.

Despite the reasonable mix of components in the Opus machine, it didn't cause a stir in benchmarking. Its performance was remarkably poor, coming well behind other K6-based machines and only just in front of many Pentium/200s. Accordingly, we can't recommend the Opus machine even as a budget buy.

Author: Dominic Bucknall