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On Fri, 17 Oct 1997, Robert Munzenrider wrote: > Everything Steve says about upgrading seems upgrading accurate, but > still.... I have a 2-year-old TP701 (Butterfly model) with a SLOWWW > 486/75 processor. Evergreen Tech will install an AMD P5 chip (I forget the > model specs) for $400. The AMD chip is rated at 133 mhz, but they say that > the effective speed is equivalent to a Pentium 75. With Win95 & Office97 > in my machine now, I'm "seeing" slow operating speed, especially when > multi-tasking - even with 24 megs of RAM. It is a AMD 5x86-133. The whole P5 numbering scheme is meant to confuse and mislead buyers. > I don't have $1500-2500 or more to buy a new system, but I might could > maybe squeeze out $400 for the cpu upgrade. The 701 seems in fine shape & > should have a couple more years of life in it. Maybe more with a cpu > upgrade. Although my upgraded system would not be the > latest/greatest/fastest around, would I pick up enough "Bang for the Buck" > to make the upgrade worthwhile?? Ok, you are really asking "is it worth $400 to go from a '486-75 to a '486-100." Lets look at this realistically. First, the CPU cores are basically the same on a clock for clock basis. Second, you are only increasing the clock by 33%. Third, you have no L2 cache to help off-set the effects of the slow 25MHz memory bus. Fourth, both CPU's have a 16K L1 cache. So realistically, since all the variables are basically staying the same except the switch from a 3x multiplier to a 4x multiplier I highly doubt you'll get anywhere near 20% more CPU speed out of it. To be quite honest you can measure 20% on benchmarks, but you can barely feel the difference when using a system. My recommendation: Live with it for a while longer, then sell it and take the money you saved on upgrading it by very small increments and buy something significantly better. 20% more speed [at best] is nothing. It it is too slow now it will still be too slow after you spent $400 on it. Please, if anyone has true performance increase numbers for this upgrade [measured via a reliable benchmark like Winbench] please share them with us. Re-installing Win95, defragging your hard drive frequently and getting a good memory manager like QEMM will probably get you more speed for far less money. If you ever want to sell that TP701 [is it a c or cs?] for a decent price let me know. I always thought they were pretty cool and almost bought one. I ended up getting a TP560 instead. =) Without knowing your system configuration, a used TP701 is worth around $500-$800. You can take that, plus your $400 for the upgrade and get into a P100 with 256K L2 cache [ref: Sharp 3040 a friend bought at Damark a while back] for ~$1000 and run 2-3 times faster. It's not as cool as the TP701 and only has a 12.1" DS display, but that ought to give you some idea of what can be had for $1000-$1500. ============================================================================ ==== Steve Parker ==== San Luis Obispo, CA ==== Multi-OS & Multitasking ==== ============================================================================