The Virtual PC BUDDY B-210

Thursday, December 21, 2000

Technical view

The heart of the BUDDY B-210 is consisting of a PCI controller card able of transferring the data at a rate of 132Mb/seconde. This card is connected to the controller by a communication cable RJ45 of 15 feet. The RJ45 communication cable can be going to up to 15 meters long according to 'statements' of the manufacturer. The controller will receive the connections for the new keyboard, the new mouse, and the monitor.

The controller comprises a Trident graphic chipset T9750 coupled to 4Mg of video SGRAM. Of course, you will not find the performances of a GTS graphics card but it does not matter since your station will be intended only for 2D applications, which are not greedy in video performance .

You will have understood that there is no question to play any 3D games such as Quake 3 or Unreal tournament on your slave station since this type of application will be strictly reserved for the main system. However, it will be possible to obtain a screen resolution which can go to 1024 X 768 in 32-bit mode, 16,7 million colors at a refresh rate of 75hz.

Finally, a LED diode located on the top of the controller case , permanently indicates the activity of the controler to give you an idea of its operating status.

The basic system required to operate Buddy B-210 is as following:

  • Pentium 133
  • 32Mb DRAM
  • Windows 95/98
  • A free PCI slot

    Of course, the more the system wil be powerful, the less you will feel the use of its resources by the remote stations to which it will be connected. Thus, I suggest using at least 128Mb of PC133 memory as well as a processor of 500Mhz or better. Note that the BUDDY B-210 is not supposed to monopolize more than 10% of the resources of the main system.



    Test drive

    To get an idea of how good it was performing, we used an old VGA monitor who trailed in our laboratory and we installed the BUDDY B-210, to put to work the whole thing

    In less than 20 minutes, everything was working perfectly. Thus, we could use a pletoria of applications of the Microsoft Office 97 suite. All rolled as a charm and no crash came to obscure the test. Not only were we well at ease on our virtual workstation, we did not notice anything with regard to the performances of the main system which continued to function normally, even with 5 different applications rolling simultaneously.

    Our main system was as following:

  • Processor Intel Celeron Coppermine 500Mhz
  • 256Mb of PC133 memory
  • Hard disk Quantum 30Gig
  • Video board Asus V7700 Deluxe

    To name only the principal components.



    Conclusions

    The technology suggested by the means of the BUDDY B-210 seemed to us very viable. Not only this solution is very functional but it is very economic. We can only raise our cap and greet well the engineers of Austin Federation for the design of such a brilliant product. We do not hesitate a second to recommend the BUDDY B-210 to whoever wants to build a minicomputer-network without having to face the annoyances of a conventional network.

    This product distributed in France, is a courtesy of LDLC

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