From: David Ross (ross_at_math.hawaii.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 05 1999 - 15:43:08 EDT
Randal,
There *is* a possibility that PEP and Maximum Upgrades are somewhat different. You can
upgrade a 486 with either a Cyrix chip or an AMD chip, and in either case there are questions
about whether writeback/writethrough are enabled on the chip. This makes a pretty big
difference, even on real-world apps. In addition, it might well be possible to crank up the
clock speed on one of the slower (DX2-50) 701s from 25mhz to 33mhz as part of the upgrade,
realizing in the process an even greater speed increase than you noticed in the upgrade
of your already-33mhz DX2-75 (*especially* on system-level tasks).
When I upgraded one of our desktops from DX2-66 to AMD5x133 I saw substantial improvement, even
on real-world apps. On the other hand, I only paid $40 for the upgrade, and the improvements were nowhere near the improvements
obtained 2 weeks ago when I threw in a new motherboard
(AMD K6-2 CPU and 100mhz memory:-)
Anyway, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a 100% speedup on a DX2-50 to DX4-133 upgrade
with proper chip tweaks, even for real world stuff. But, that DX2-50 was pretty slow to begin with!
- David
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