Digital Star IntelliPro BTS 2000 PC
Digital Star Computers submitted an AMD-based machine, submitting a 1.33GHz processor instead of AMD's latest processor 1.4GHz Athlon. The motherboards was an Asus A7M266, which can hold up to 2GB of DDR-RAM. The motherboard only has two DIMM slots, but you can install 1GB modules in each of the banks to give you 2GB. For our tests, we were provided a single 256MB DDR-RAM module. There were no large internal cooling fans or exhaust fans inside the case, which we found strange. We are used to seeing at least one cooling fan for the interior. The only fan present was the CPU fan.
The Digital Star PC features a 64MB Leadtek Winfast Geforce 3 graphics card includes an S-video and DVI connector. When we first tested the Digital Star machine, we ended getting some low scores which we couldn't understand. After examining the system we found out that the mini AGP drivers were not installed from the Asus motherboard driver CD. These increased the performance dramatically as you can see in the results chart. It is so important to make sure you have installed all your drivers--they play a vital role in how well your system performs.
The Digital Star machine shipped a 40GB Seagate hard disk drive, which performed on par with most of the other hard drives. This PC also shipped with a Ricoh MP7200A CD-RW which happened to be one of our favourite burners because of its speed and stability--it can burn conventional CDs at an incredible 20x. This burner is a real screamer and alone it burnt our 74-minute audio CD in less than five minutes. The Digital Star machine also came with a 16x Pioneer DVD player, an internal Dynamic 56K Rockwell PCI modem, a two-port IEEE 1394 FireWire panel, and a pair of SP168 Flat Panel Stereo Multimedia USB Speakers (which had to be the poorest performing speakers in this roundup). The 17in Digital Star 770FA monitor wasn't bad. It has dot pitch of 0.25 and a maximum resolution of 1280 x 1024. The overall picture quality was good but this monitor posed no real threat to most of the others.
We didn't see a huge performance difference between the 1.3GHz and the 1.4GHz Athlon as you can see from the test results. In fact, this Digital Star machine was faster than the other two AMD machines in Quake 3 and in 3DMark 2001. In Content Creation Winstone it was fourth fastest overall, and in Business Winstone it was again fourth fastest (it proved to be slightly slower than the other two AMD machines and the Gateway PC). In our CD-R/DVD Playback test we managed to get a good result. There was a slight hiccup at the start of the burn process and right at the end. We did, however, notice that the burn process took slightly longer than it should have.
Digital Star IntelliPro BTS 2000 PC
Company: Digital Star
Ph: 02 8748 6888
Price: AU$3,849
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