120-MHz Pentium Power for Under $400

Tests of a preliminary version of Intel's Pentium Overdrive processor for upgradable Pentium PCs indicate that with a $399 upgrade, your applications can run more than 50 percent faster. The latest Pentium Overdrive turns 60- or 66-MHz Pentium systems into 120- or 133-MHz machines.

Intel also expected to release in March a 125-MHz Overdrive for 75-MHz Pentium PCs ($399). And 150- and 166-MHz Overdrives ($499 and $679) that upgrade 90- and 100-MHz PCs are slated for May arrival.

The newest Overdrive CPUs should feel more at home when placed in your PC than the first Pentium Overdrives, which upgraded 486 systems. Unlike the older Overdrives, the newer upgrade chips don't have to make special compensation for the 486's 32-bit I/O bus.

You can also improve your system's performance by adding memory. Tests performed by Intel indicate that if your PC runs business applications (e.g., spreadsheets or databases), upgrading your processor as well as RAM yields the best performance improvement. However, adding memory beyond 16 MB of RAM provides a minimal (about 1 percent) improvement, the tests show.

For consumer applications such as 3D Home Architect and Quicken, Intel says simply increasing system RAM from 8 to 16 MB results in a 7 percent improvement at most, while upgrading the CPU from 60 to 120 MHz and adding 8 MB of RAM results in increases ranging from 72 percent to 99 percent. Upgrading the Pentium alone results in performance boosts of 52 percent to 79 percent, according to Intel.

---

CPU/FPU Operations Scale Proportionally

illustration_link (4 Kbytes)

Although the processor is running at 120 MHz, the same Zeos Pantera doesn't see performance improvements quite as high when running 16-bit Windows applications. Still, performance gain of about 68 percent is quite good.

---

Overdrive Boosts Application Performance

illustration_link (3 Kbytes)

A Zeos Pantera with 16 MB of 70-ns RAM, 256 KB of asynchronous SRAM cache, 384 KB of shadow RAM enabled, and a Diamond ViperPCI graphics accelerator card with 2 MB of VRAM and a Weitek Power 9000 chip scales nicely on CPU/FPU tests.