Really? Well I struggled to find them with google, I even posted here
earlier, requesting benchmarks (without any replies).
If any one can post benchmarks to contradict the site please do!!
1) You can't compare two CPUs by running benchmarks that
stress OTHER parts of a system.
2) I had already attempted to take a short-cut regarding
performance, it is NOT worth the time to do all this
research on a minor upgrade to a decade old system.
3) The 'site you linked, did list figures for synthetic CPU
performance, most of the figures prior to the Game entries
would be the more relevant comparison between the CPUs.
4) Try Google searching for K6-2 & Pentium 3 benchmarks
If they were incorrect I imagine it would have been spotted now,
after several years!!
No, consider that quite a few web reviews are wrong or
inconclusive, if not so poorly set up to be worthless
indications. Just take my word for it, the performance
difference is very large between a K6-2 and a (near 1 GHz)
coppermine P3. There is absolutely nothing the K6-2 does
anywhere near as fast, except possibly some VERY rare
application that only had 3DNow optimizations, and offhand I
can't think of any such applications that didn't have at
least MMX if not SSE support if they had 3Dnow by the time a
P3 Coppermine was near 1GHz.
If you still doubt them why not drop them an email?
mailto:
[email protected]
At this point who cares?
Do you realize how much time it would take to email every
single web reviewer who had inconclusive (if not worse)
reviews, stats, etc, etc ? It's just not worth the time,
and besides that, the average reviewer is a young kid that
gets very defensive when they're corrected, will argue
themselves into a hole and then just ignore all logic and
other reviews. Even so, the page you linked was merely a
set of results, it did not appear to be a direct comparison
of the two CPUs for any useful purpose- you have taken one
small subset of data out of a much larger amount, out of
context.
Well yes but you cannot compare CPU's running in boxes with
vastly different configurations.
That's exactly what the review did, because it used
different motherboard chipsets.
Well I might get my K6 tomorrow, I have already forked out
£2.50 on some thermal compound, (more than it cost for the CPU!!).
Did it ever dawn on you that it might've been so cheap
because it doen't have very good performance? I have a
stack of old K6 CPUs "somewhere", I lost them and it
wouldn't be worth the trouble to find them. It's not just
that they had low performance but so many limitations
compared to other slightly newer yet (today) quite cheap if
not free hardware. Just a couple years later the typical
motherboard had vastly better memory performance running
same PC100 memory, actually had a fair amount of
compatibility with AGP video cards, could run ATA66 hard
drives and support far larger drives. As mentioned
previously, there is a certain "hump" to get over for
moderately reasonable performance at modern tasks and it
takes a little bit newer system to meet that goal.
On slighty unhappier note it seems that a an AMD K6-2 will interpretate
a X2 clock as a X6 clock, so I might be able to run a 450MHz AMD.
So maybe I should have bought a faster processor!!
Will I have to spend another £1 to get one?!!
Unhappier? That's exactly what you should be wanting, since
your board doesnt even support 100MHz FSB.
Maybe the graphics card was a bottle neck but it still showed the
PIII running slower.
No, it showed an entire system running slower. It was a bit
of coincidence that it happened to have a P3 in it.
I'm not going to spend any more time on this silliness, it's
a known fact that a K6-2 is the slowest CPU one could buy,
by the time a P3 Coppermine CPU came out. Well on second
thought there were probably some odd IBM/Via/C3 CPUs still
in the market but they never had much interest from anyone
concerned about performance.
I don't think the benchmarks are wrong because if they are they
must have got a whole series of them wrong, here the PIII 700
is also slower.
Ignorance is bliss?
I think the truth is the K6-2 is a great processor which punches
above it weight in some applications.
To find truth, first you would need more than one
ill-configured benchmark. There were tons of benchmarks out
there and it's just silly to dwell on what is known
industry-wide. There is NO K6-2 that is as fast as even the
slowest P3, even the generation before the P3 coppermine
which was slower and only went up to around 600MHz.
However, same things apply that I mentioned about your
system, that there are other bottlenecks that just a CPU.
If you put a P3 (or a K6-2, or whatever) on a horrible or
misconfigured motherboard, or have OS problems, it may
easily effect the performance.
