A New Cost-Saving Upgrade Solution

Here's a neat trick for VARs wanting to make older computers keep up the pace, or help clients who need more PC performance, but are trying to depreciate their old PCs. <P> To maintain an acceptable performance level, you will either need to purchase new equipment or upgrade subsystems in existing PCs. Purchasing, however, is expensive, and the upgrading can be a time-consuming and complicated project. A full-fledged upgrade will generally require a motherboard upgrade, which can be a huge nightmare. New PCs may seem to be a better choice since the added headaches would not justify the cost-savings. <P> Not so fast--Evergreen Technologies Inc.'s new AcceleraPCI upgrade platform may change your mind about purchasing and complicated upgrades. It combines the benefits of a motherboard upgrade with the simplicity of a standard PCI card installation. <P> We tested the Accelera-PCI with an old Pentium 133 MHz system. The actual process took less than 15 minutes. An install disk performed a compatibility check of the current system with the AcceleraPCI (the product has problems with bus-mastering video cards and certain SCSI controllers, a glitch that should be fixed in the second release due later this year). VARs contemplating using the AcceleraPCI should first download the software at www.evertech.com to check the compatibility of the target systems. <P> With a compatible system, the process is a simple matter of inserting a PCI card and turning on the system. The upgraded system ran on the hardware on the PCI card--an Intel Celeron 433 processor with the 440ZX chipset with 64 MB of RAM. Depending on the metric used, our system performance increased from 3.6 to 8.2 times. <P> The process is as painless as an upgrade can be and warrants serious consideration in any organization looking for a performance boost in their PCs.

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