Armari R760Te

Never one for piling them high and selling them cheap, Armari has once again proved its worth as a builder of higher-end systems. The 760Te is the first dual-AMD system we've seen with processors running at more than 1.2GHz. It also comes with Microsoft's shiny new Windows XP Professional OS.

AMD is playing Cyrix's old game when it comes to the names of its Palamino-based processors: the 1.4GHz Athlon MPs in this machine are officially named 'Athlon MP 1600+'. Back in the late 1990s, Cyrix gave its 6x86 processors names such as the P166+, which indicated that, although it wasn't running at 166MHz, its 'P rating' was equivalent to a 166MHz Pentium.

It's a cynical game to be playing, but a necessary one if Intel's lead in the clock speed stakes isn't to become too much of a marketing disadvantage.

We're not normally given to enthusing about something as mundane as a PC's case, but the 760Te's really is a treat. To get into the machine you simply pull the lever on the side panel. Inside, there are two 3.5in drive cages, each capable of accommodating no fewer than three drives.

To remove the cages, just flip a metal catch. To install a device in the spare 5.25in front-panel bay, just press the two tags on the side of the machine and the top half of the fascia pops off.

The other two front panel bays are occupied by a Plextor 24x 10x 40x CD-RW drive and Pioneer 106S 16-speed DVD-ROM. There's a spare front panel 3.5in bay too, a rarity these days.

The power supply is a beefy 340W to cope with the demands of two processors, and three case fans allay any fears about cooling.

In one of the two drive cages is a 60GB IBM 60GXP UltraDMA100 hard drive.

The rest of the core components are connected to Tyan's Tiger MP S2460 motherboard. This is a consumer version of the Thunder dual-processor boards with ATX format rather than the more awkward E-ATX, and lacks niceties such as integrated SCSI and networking. It does, however have four unused 64/32bit PCI slots, plus two standard 32bit slots, which in this machine are occupied by a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 sound card and an Intel Pro/100 S 10/100BaseTX network adaptor.

The SoundBlaster drives a set of Cambridge Soundworks Digital speakers.

Nestling in the DDR SDRAM slots are two PC2100 512MB DIMMs, for a total of 1GB of system memory. There are two slots free for upgrading once 1GB becomes passe. No prizes for guessing the 760Te's graphics card - an nVidia GeForce3 in the form of a 3DPower Absolute Morpheus with 64MB of DDR memory.

The card drives one of Mitsubishi's rather super Diamond Pro 920 monitors, a 19in model with the pin-sharp performance we've come to expect from Diamondtron NF tubes.

To shave a little money off the total cost, some manufacturers have been avoiding optical mice on even their more expensive systems, but Armari provides a sleek grey and black Logitech optical rodent, as well as a Logitech internet keyboard with various shortcut buttons.

Our primary benchmark, BapCo's SYSmark 2001, returned a score of 201. This unfortunately isn't directly comparable with previous results for dual Intel processors because it's the first machine we've tested running Windows XP. But assuming XP gives results within about 10 per cent of the older operating systems, it's the fastest score ever.

The same goes for our 3DStudio MAX render, which was completed in a stonking eight minutes 46 seconds. It was equally fast in our Seti@home test, completing it in three minutes 49 seconds.

Intel was probably hoping that AMD would somehow manage to drop the ball when it came to trespassing on its dual-processor territory. But the fact is that the combination of the Athlon MP processor and the 760MP chipset is an overwhelming success, and the R760Te is an exemplary system with which to show it off.

If you're hankering for a dual-processor workstation but don't have four grand to spend, buy this machine.

Contact
Armari: 020 8993 4111 www.armari.com