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Evergreen 701C upgrade results



I ran across this tonight on Evergreen's webpage. There have been some
questions lately regarding the actual performance benefits that this type of
upgrade would bring. I don't remember anyone mentioning this page, so here
goes.

One of the comparisons uses an IBM 701c with a 486 DX2/50 MHz CPU with 4MB
RAM running Winstone 97. They upgraded the system to 20MB RAM and ran the
tests, then upgraded to processor to a 586 (133MHz, at least that is what
they claim). Here are Evergreen's results:

Configuration                                    Winstone 97 score
------------------------------                          --------------------
------
486/50 4MB                                         Test would not run (Duh!)
486/50 20MB                                        7.16
586/133 20MB                                      16.4

Here is the link to this page: http://www.evertech.com/portperf.html

All in all, I think this is a pretty decent performance increase. Is it
worth the $400+ that it costs? Well, we all know who's decision that is!

I also dug up the February 97 issue of Computer Shopper, which tested 14
133MHz Pentium notebooks. I know this may not seem like a fair comparison,
but it is hard to find P75 - P100 benchmarks using Winstone 97. The Winstone
97 results ranged from a low of 19.4 for the Toshiba Tecra 720CDT, to a high
of 27.4 for the Dell Latitudee LM P133ST (both machines were using 16MB EDO
RAM). Compared to these scores, especially the Toshiba (although it was
tested at 1024x768 resolution), the performance difference is not that
great. Upgrade the RAM to 40MB and there might only be a point or so
difference. Of course, this is all assuming that Evergreen's published
figures are accurate. I'll get my 701c 75MHz with 24MB RAM out and run the
Winstone 97 test to get some kind of comparison.

I know these tests don't mean that much to some of the non-Windows users on
the list (I see you nodding your head, Paul!), but maybe we can finally see
if these upgrades are worth the money.

Eric Giles