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On Wed, 22 Oct 1997 23:40:58 -0500, Eric Giles wrote: >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 > Well, I was actually nodding my head that unlike Pep Sales, there were actually well-known benchmarks, but of course, for Windows. Everyone probably knows that although I can lend a hand to Windows problems, I am an OS/2 fanatic (not like it isn't obvious!). And regarding Evergreen's benchmarks, it's hard to get an accurate score because things are all relative - everyone's machine (unless they are company machines) should be tailored to that individual person's needs, like screen resolution, RAM, Hard drive, operating system and applications, external options, PCMCIA options, etc. The list goes on and on and... you get the point. Paul