The Panrix Lightning's IBM DHEA 36480 hard disk drive shows the highest CPU utilisation, although in other systems it returns a much lower value. The only obvious trend is that the Maxtor DiamondMax drives in the Actinet Netrunner Workstation, Computhings Didar Business PII 233 and IBM PC 300XL show some of the worst scores, although in the Dotlink Magnum II 233 it returns one of the best. There's no evident differentiation between E-IDE and Ultra ATA hard drives here. As expected, the AGP graphics cards show no 2D performance edge over the PCI-based counterparts. There's no consistent measurable performance difference between the two RAM types and chipsets used in this review.
Variations are due chiefly to motherboard design and BIOS optimisation.
The trend in this chart is for VFM to increase with decreasing price. As the range of performance scores in this group isn't very large, exceptions to this trend are due to a lower feature score. You can also see that the cheapest systems aren't necessarily the best value for money, although the budget-priced Dotlink Magnum II 233 shows a good balance if price is you're main consideration. The table is sorted in order of decreasing CD-ROM WinMark 98 score, and shows a general correlation between access time and overall performance. The best overall performer is the new Pioneer DR-501S mechanism in the CDOS Mag Terminator.