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Intel's 50-MHz 80486DX chip has finally stumbled out the door. Vendors have been cautious, and very few are shipping final units. In this dual review we look at the Compaq Deskpro 486/50L and the Dell Powerline 450SE--two of the first 486/50s to ship.
We were surprised that these two 486/50s were just slightly faster as file servers than a similarly equipped 486/33 (the IBM PS/2 Model 95 XP 486--the fastest file server tested in our last server comparison) in our 24-workstation office test suite.
However, both the Compaq and the Dell were much faster than the IBM in workstation tests. Our new database server suite (see How we test) revealed that in a very demanding client/server environment, servers with drive arrays were much better equipped to handle the heavy demands than those with a single drive. The Dell, which came equipped with a three-drive array, had a greater than 50 percent advantage in transactions per minute than the Compaq, which had a single drive.
The Compaq is housed in a desktop case with fine expandability, and the capability to have up to 2.4 gigabytes of internal storage in a dual 1.2-gigabyte drive array. The Dell is housed in a tower case, has superior expansion capabilities, and supports a drive array of as much as 650 megabytes. Both systems are based on the Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) bus.
On the workstation tests the Compaq was 18 percent faster than the Dell in CPU speed and 45 percent faster than the average 486/33. The Compaq comes with Intel's integrated cache chip set that, in addition to the primary cache inside the CPU, provides a secondary 8249DX/82490DX cache subsystem.
According to Intel, the secondary cache is connected to the CPU via a dedicated bus that allows fast data retrieval of most often used data. This increases retrieval speeds and reduces traffic on the memory bus.
Dell opted not to use Intel's cache and instead has 128K of 20-nanosecond RAM cache; it was 15 percent slower than the Compaq.
The Compaq was configured with a single 340-megabyte Conner IDE drive and was 49 percent faster than the Dell and 45 percent faster than the average 486/33 in a workstation configuration. In database server tests, where there is...