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I appreciate all the input from the group regarding the 5x86 upgrade question. I was wondering if David Ross could post his impressions on the speed differences with the new chip on his desktop machine. Chris ---------- From: David Ross[SMTP:ross@math.hawaii.edu] Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 1996 2:06 AM To: David Fox Cc: thinkpad@cs.utk.edu Subject: Re: DX4-74 --> 5x86-100 Conversion Question With respect to claimed speed improvements if the 701 chip is replaced with a 5x86, I wrote: > > If PEP or anyone else is seriously > > claiming that the new chip will double the speed, they should be > > willing to back it up with some sort of evidence, or maybe a > > money-back guarantee:-) David Fox replied: > Wouldn't that be AMD's responsibility? I'm interested in hearing > opinions of how big the improvement is likely to be - you sound pretty > skeptical. Neither AMD nor Cyrix (I don't know which chip PEP uses) make claims about *systemic* speed improvements; this is very difficult, since system speed is also a function of bus, cache, and BIOS (not to mention video and drive - both relatively fast on the 701, by the way). This is a common topic of discussion on several Usenet groups. Despite my skepticism, I plan to replace the DX2-66 on my home desktop machine with one of these chips - it is clear that the bottleneck on *that* machine is the CPU, and anyway for $40-$50 it is worth a shot. However, on the 701 the bus and lack of cache seem to be real problems: for example, on most systemic benchmarks it runs much slower than my home machine (though the disk and video are comparable). I'd be really surprised to see more than a marginal improvement in speed from the upgrade, certainly not enough to warrant the cost (much more than the $50 the chip itself costs!) - David R.