Cyrix 586 MediaGX and Motherboard
AVT

Introduction:

The Cyrix MGX differs from the competition in one way, and it's a huge difference: everything (well not everything) is built onto the motherboard or into the CPU (i.e. sound and graphics). Cyrix claim that they have done this to gain performance by avoiding busses like the PCI bus to the graphics, but if you read on and get to the performance part of this review I thing you understand that this isn't the reason. I believe that the reason for doing this is saving money, its much cheaper to develop and manufacture one chip rather than ten. However because of this the Cyrix has one big advantage: it's cheap, really cheap. This makes the MGX a good choice for costumers looking into the sub $500 market. This could be big companies buying computers in large quantities, one-man-companies who just use the computer for billing, accountancy and such.

About the card and CPU:

The board is very small, one of the smallest boards I've seen, especially for a more modern system. It fits very easily into any AT case. Once in the case, you connect all of the connections. The only features different from the typical AT connections are the video and audio daughterboards. The boards are very small and are screwed onto the rear of the case. They are connected to the motherboard via a ribbon cable. Its pretty easy to do.

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