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To: Paul Engel who wrote (49996)	3/6/1998 9:31:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 186894

IBM Consumer Division: K6/233 based IBM Aptiva E26 BMarch 24, 1998 IBM's Consumer Division may have been late to the subzero party, but--in certain respects--its K6/233-powered Aptiva E26 ($999 street) is the best dressed of the systems in this roundup, at least in terms of hardware. The Aptiva E26 is housed in a standard mini-tower case, so it provides more expansion room than the norm for this roundup. Up front, in addition to a floppy disk drive and a 24X CD-ROM drive, there are two empty 5.25-inch drive bays. Removing the cover to get inside is easy, once you know how to do it; the system manual graphically outlines this process step by step. Just flip the rear-mounted cover lock, depress a release button inside the front of the cover at the bottom of the system, and slide the cover off--no tools are required. You'll reap the benefits of having a full-size mini-tower when it comes to expansion space. Although no internal drive bays are available, there are two PCI slot, three ISA slots (one taken by a K56flex modem), and one shared expansion slot. On the system's motherboard, you'll find a 233-MHz K6 processor and ALi chip set; you won't find any L2 cache. Also integrated on the board is a Crystal audio chip set as well as an ATI 3D Rage II+DVD graphics engine (with 1MB of nonupgradable SGRAM, which means the machine itself can't handle 16-bit color at 1,024-by-768 resolution). Two DIMM sockets are available for SDRAM; one was occupied in our test configuration. The IBM Aptiva was a midrange performer on our benchmark tests. Its Winstone, Graphics WinMark, and CPUmark32 scores came in behind Compaq's scores, due to the Aptiva's lack of L2 cache. One area in which the Aptiva falls short of the competition is bundled software. Though others provide some options for each family member, the IBM unit is geared toward adults. It comes preloaded with Lotus SmartSuite 97 and a host of utilities.y PC WEEK