The recent discussion of the K7 Athlon envy piqued my interest because
I recently faced the decision of how to upgrade from my K6/200. I had
two candidates:
prices for mb, CPU(s) and fan(s):
K7/500 plus Asus K7M, about $375
dual Celerons on Abit BP6, about $250
I was attracted to the Athlon because of the specs: reported
performance better than P-IIIs, 2 MB cache, 200 MHz bus, etc.
However, thanks to several helpful readers who performed a basic
floating-point benchmark (a matrix multiply) it seemed that simple
floating-point operations (multiplies and add) do not fully exploit
the K7's specs. Since I don't play games or do any fancy graphics,
floating-point and integer performance is more important to me.
So I went with the BP6 with two Celeron 366s, which happen to reliably
overclock to 572 Mhz (144% !). This machine has incredible
performance:
- Runs 2.2.12-20smp SMP with RH 6.1
- dmesg reports 1141.96 BogoMIPS
- Performs FP benchmark in 4.4 sec (using one CPU only), compared to:
P-II/400 8.9
Sun Ultra 60 16
K7/500 17
- Supports up to 8 IDE drives, 4 ea. DMA/33 and DMA/66
- Has 2 on-board USB ports
- No problems @ 104 MHz FSB with PC-100 mem, STB video, AHA2903,
AudioPCI
- Has an avid user group with info at www.bp6.com, lots of useful info
For $47 each, the C366 Celerons are remarkable. They overclock better
than more expensive C400s (have two at work which only go to 522 Mhz).
I still have a Pentium 90 which cost $600 in 1994. It does the
benchmark above in 72 seconds. :-(
There's no doubt that the K7 is an excellent chip, and for many
applications it is preferable for the same reasons that my $250
machine can't really replace a Sun Ultra 60.
But I think that for many people, the lower cost BP6 board is more
than adequate and will suffice quite well.
Jim
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