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CCK Technologies P133- by Rodney Baker

More and more these days, those of us who are conversant with the workings of modern hardware and software are given the title of "guru" by those who are less conversant with technology. And we are often called upon to assist and advise when, as a result of the inexorable forward march of technology and the current "state of the art", an upgrade is finally deemed to be necessary.

This time it was the local church, whose secretary had been struggling, even wrestling, with an outdated 486DX-40 with 4MB (!!) RAM, trying, with varying degrees of success, to run Microsoft Office 4.2 on DOS 5/Windows 3.1.

To Upgrade or to Replace?

I was first called upon to assist when the regular General Protection Faults, coffee breaks waiting for Word for Windows 6.0 to load and other assorted irritations finally became too much. The first thing I decided to do was to upgrade the RAM to 16MB and optimise the Windows settings (including installing the correct video drivers for the Trident card) but this was only a stopgap measure. The 420MB hard drive just wasn't adequate and it was decided that a new machine was called for. A budget was set of AUS $2,000 even though I advised that I thought they were about $1,000 short of doing the job properly. But I was overruled; that was all they could afford.

Based on this, I set about doing some research on current prices and what could be achieved within the allowed budget. Many firms were advertising specials on systems which included unnecessary items (for an office PC largely used for DTP and accounting) such as sound cards, multimedia speaker kits, lots of bundled multimedia and educational software and, of course, Windows 95 preloaded.

Since I was planning to set the church up with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and to keep their current suite of Windows 3.1 applications (which were serving their needs very well and in no real need of upgrading) Windows 95 and all the other software were redundant. Unfortunately no-one I came across offered the choice of specifying OS/2 Warp 4.0. Quite apart from that, none of the bundled systems I looked at came close to what I expected in terms of quality components either. Being built down to a price, they all used cheap (and sometimes nasty) monitors, keyboards and cases. Not the recipe for a good, long-lasting office machine.

Why OS/2 when they are using predominantly Windows 3.1 apps? Well, for starters the thought of running DOS and the FAT file system on a 1.6GB hard drive makes me shudder. HPFS is just so much more efficient. That, coupled with OS/2's stability and multitasking capability makes it a no-brainer for me. Besides, with the prospect of Java applications becoming viable alternatives in the not too distant future and the emergence of other application suites such as Star Office 4.0 made OS/2 look more and more like the right choice. There's also the possibility of another couple of PC's being networked with the new machine and OS/2 provides that capability right out of the box.

Why Pay for Name Brands?

While researching prices, I enquired of a friend of mine who runs a business called CCK Technologies as to what they could do for me. CCK is a small company, just getting off the ground by business standards, but nevertheless have proven to be reliable with support, backup and supply. Peter Cockburn put some prices together and between us we specced out a system which was right on the money.

The spec we came up with is as follows:

The system would have come in just under the church's budget with 16MB RAM, and was just over with 32MB. I suggested that they go with 32MB and spend the extra now, given that memory requirements were likely to go up, not down. On this point, they agreed and approved the purchase.

Attention to Detail

I was present when CCK Technologies assembled the computer (and have seen them doing other customers' systems also) so I can testify to the care with which it was built. Everything was checked and double checked before moving on to the next step. This is part of their rationale -- doing it right the first time and providing the customer with a system which works from first power-on. If they're not happy with it, they won't ship it. Simple.

Setting up the ABit motherboard for the processor is simplicity itself. It autodetects almost every CPU currently known and sets the voltage, clock speed and other parameters on power up. It also has a "CPU Soft Menu" available from the BIOS set up screen which allows you to override parameters if necessary. However, in their documentation Abit warns that you shouldn't play with settings unless you know exactly what you're doing. Good advice. I left it alone.

This motherboard is also interesting in that it provides an OS/2-specific BIOS setting for memory access when using more than 64MB RAM. I've not come across this before.

The Asus video card was a pleasant surprise, providing OS/2 drivers on the supplied CD-ROM and instructions for installing same in the manual, even if the supplied driver is a copy of the S3 drivers available on the S3 web site or the Asus web site rather than a vendor-specific driver as their NT and Windows 95 drivers appear to be. Nevertheless, they do support OS/2 by providing drivers and that is to be commended.

Installation and Performance

OS/2 Warp 4.0's installation program correctly identified the S3 86C775 chipset on the card and installed the appropriate drivers by default anyway. Having previously downloaded the latest 3.03.16 drivers from S3 I reset the video to standard VGA and installed the new drivers. They installed flawlessly the first time and have been rock solid ever since. Video performance on this machine is excellent and I'd have no hesitation in recommending the Asus PCI-V775V2C video card to any OS/2 user in the market for a low-midrange PCI video card (max. 2MB RAM).

The Optiquest monitor is also a good, mid-priced performer. These days I wouldn't recommend anything less than a 15" monitor, especially if you want to run higher video resolutions (1024x768 and above). This particular monitor can handle that resolution at 65k colours at a healthy 75Hz vertical refresh rate with a horizontal rate of 60kHz. This assures flicker free display and no eye strain, even when used for long periods. The new S3 drivers allow for selection of font sizes (large, small, or auto) for higher video resolutions for OS/2, seamless WIN-OS/2 and full screen WIn-OS/2 sessions and the Optiquest monitor gives excellent clarity even on the "small fonts" setting. Colour depth and presentation is also good. Overall, a very good performer.

The performance of the Western Digital hard drives and Panasonic CD-ROM drives are well known so there's no need to elaborate on the basics, but a little optimisation of BIOS parameters and IBM1S506.ADD parameters went a long way to making sure that performance was as good as it could be. To see what I mean, check out the disk transfer speeds before and after optimisation (results are from SysBench 0.9.1d). One wonders how many other systems out there could benefit from similar optimisation exercises, although that could be an article in itself.

Once OS/2 was installed and running, all that remained was to install the software and test the system for a while before delivering it to its final home. This all proceeded without a hitch. So far, in a week of testing with OS/2 and both seamless and full-screen WIN-OS/2 sessions I haven't managed to hang or crash it once. Its video performance is good, drive speed excellent, multitasking fast and smooth and overall it's a very snappy performer. Comparing it to a couple of genuine IBM machines (PC-350's) of similar specification which I recently commissioned for a client through my work, this feels noticeably smoother and faster in its performance.

Conclusions

To summarise, CCK Technologies have delivered a good, honest, reliable performer which runs OS/2 extremely well. They have done so at a competitive price and excellent service. Well done.

* * *

CCK Technologies Pentium 133 System

by CCK Technologies
Phone: +61 8 8357 4444
Fax: +61 8 8276 6948
e-mail: peter.cockburn@adelaide.on.net
MSRP: AUS$2,450

Rodney Baker is a long-time OS/2 user, computer hobbyist and doesn't have a web page.


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