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| IBM NetVista A40 |
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Hardware Reviews May 2001 • Vol.4 Issue 5 |
IBM NetVista A40 | ||
 Call it the American way, but we love to see a lean underdog take a bone away from the heftier hounds in the pack. IBM's NetVista A40 business PC ($1,481) gets a better BAPCo SYSmark2000 benchmarking utility score with a 933MHz Pentium III than most of the 1GHz home systems we've tested in this price range. SYSmark2000 reported that the A40 had a 171 overall rating in our tests. That's pretty hot for a sub-1GHz system. You won't find home-user niceties such as a CD-RW (CD-rewriteable) drive here. You won't even find speakers. But if you're looking for a trim workhorse that can be rolled out en masse, ready to be hooked up to your corporate network, the A40 gives you a great way to go. Its compact mini-desktop case fits easily into any desktop, especially if you stand it on one side using the included plastic base. Foremost of its long list of nice specifications, the NetVista A40 boasts a staggering 256MB of SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM; 512MB maximum). That's probably far more than you'll need to run many applications at once and have multiple documents open in each. This is great news for users whose Taskbars at the bottoms of their screens look like toy trains because of all the programs they run simultaneously. A 133MHz system bus gives the 933MHz Pentium III a fast avenue to that fat RAM. The NetVista A40's Intel Pro/100 VE 100Mbps Ethernet port and Windows 2000 Professional operating system mean that the system should fit right into your networked office. It's an attractive, ebony system with a sharp 17-inch IBM G78 monitor as its focal point. Its matching mouse has a good scrolling lever and three buttons. We thought it was a two-button mouse at first, but as it turned out, there's a smaller button just ahead of the scrolling lever. IBM chose a Quantum 20.4GB hard drive for the A40. That's probably big enough for the amount of data a business PC may accumulate in its lifecycle, although many home PCs at a similar price have 30GB, 40GB, or even 60GB drives. The NetVista A40's sole optical drive is a 24X TEAC CD-224E. This notebook-style CD-ROM drive grips your CD by its hub, making it easier to insert if you have the PC set up on its side. However, the TEAC drive seemed especially slow when loading software from a moderately fingerprinted CD. Despite its surprising prowess in the BAPCo SYSmark2000 benchmarking tests, the A40 didn't fare so well in Video2000 or 3-DMark2000. In the former, low ratings in Performance (279), Features (369), and Quality (538) combined for a disappointing 1,185 total score. This isn't a flaw that you would even notice for most business tasks, of course, but we're passing it along. And despite the A40's low 3-DMark2000 score (900), we found its integrated Intel 82815 graphics chipset really isn't that bad for 3-D gaming. Even with a maximum of 4MB video memory, the chipset gave us smooth Quake III fragging at a resolution of 800 x 600. The compromise for the A40's mini-desktop case is that it only has two free PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slots on a daughterboard, and they are not easy to get to. The daughterboard sits in one of the PCI slots on the motherboard itself and lets you seat expansion cards parallel to the motherboard rather than perpendicularly. IBM chose this path so you could add regular PCI cards instead of scarce, low-profile ones and still have them fit inside the compact case. Our test system had a physical AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot on the motherboard, but the case didn't have a corresponding rear expansion slot for monitor cable access. This means you can't add a new AGP video card. In fact, we're not sure if the slot even works, as the diagram inside the case's lid says it's not used. The A40 does have two rear USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports, though, to make it easier to expand the system through external devices such as a Zip drive or CD-RW (CD-rewriteable) drive. We don't like the fact that the A40's recovery software is on the hard drive rather than CD, but corporate users may prefer to resurrect a troubled NetVista over a network connection. The A40 comes with PC-Doctor, IBM Backup and Restore, and other software. The IBM NetVista A40 stands alone as a great business system, assuming you have no need of bells and whistles. It's a good performer out of the box. If you compare it with new Windows Me systems in the same price range, it becomes a great performer. IBM gives NetVista A40 buyers a three-year parts/one-year labor warranty, with onsite service for the first year. The company also offers volume pricing, making it even more attractive to businesses. by Marty Sems
$1,481 IBM (888) 746-7426 (914) 765-1900 http://www.ibm.com
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