London-based Elonex Plc has taken its first step into the higher-end workstation market. In fact the new GS-400 family represent not so much a step, as a dangling of toes into the water – the machine’s guts come from Intel Systems, which the company then ‘Elonex-ises’. If they prove popular then the company may develop its own motherboards. The initial release consisted of two 32-bit EISA-based machines, one running at 66MHz, the other at half the speed. Most work has gone into tuning the machines for graphics work: the company reckons that it can out-perform conventional video adaptor boards with a combination of a Mach32 graphics accelerator, a 32-bit linear frame buffer and up to 2Mb of fast video RAM. The entry price of a 33MHz machine with 8Mb of RAM, a 170Mb hard disk and monitor is UKP2,475. The 66MHz equivalent costs UKP320 more.
