Review of PowerLeap Adapter Part 3

Review of PowerLeap Adapter

The PowerLeap Adapter  What is a PowerLeap adapter? Packard Bell upgrades PowerLeap advantages What do you get? Installation Need help or have questions?	Part 1	AMD K6-2 300
PowerLeap with an Intel 233 MHz MMX Intel processors Performance increase	Part 2
PowerLeap with an AMD K6-2 300 MHz AMD processors Performance increase	Part 3
PL-PRO/MMX Plus! What is a PowerLeap Plus! adapter? New features of the Plus! Overclocking with a PL-PRO/MMX Plus!	Part 4
PL-K6-III What is the PL-K6-III? Evolution in performance using PowerLeap adapters	Part 5
Related Reviews and Articles 400 MHz AMD K6-2 Vs. AMD K6-III -  Is the AMD K6-III faster then a AMD K6-2, find out. The AMD K6-III A Solution for Computers without L2 cache - An advantage of the K6-III My video performance increase - PowerLeap helped to increase the performance of my video card. My BIOS upgrade - This BIOS upgrade made it possible for me to use non-Intel Processors.
Visit the PowerLeap Web Site for more information

 

Well, my motherboard does not support any of the AMD processors; when I tried the AMD processors on my system it would not boot.  This lack of support was done on purpose by the BIOS makers, to give you an Intel-only option.  Fortunately, there is a way around this problem.  I obtained a new BIOS from Unicore Software, the makers of Mr. BIOS.  You can read my review of this BIOS on the Mr. BIOS review page of my site.

After the BIOS upgrade my system boots with no problems.  The good news is that not every motherboard needs a BIOS upgrade.  For example, the PB 600 with the Phoenix BIOS 4.04 or greater will support the K6 processors, eliminating the need for a BIOS upgrade.  So far, no one that I know of has tested the PB 600 with the K6 266 or 300 or K6-2.  I would expect the K6 266 or 300 to work, however the K6-2 processors are questionable as they are a far newer technology.  Until someone tries these combinations I cannot be sure as to what options work.

Before you choose an AMD processor for your PowerLeap, you should check the compatability of your BIOS.  For Packard Bell systems see my chart for the latest information.

I replaced my Intel 233MHz MMX and my PL-PRO/MMX with an AMD 300 MHz and a PL-PRO/MMX Plus! and here are my results.  You do not need to have the PL-PRO/MMX Plus! to get the K6-2 to work; PowerLeap says "The regular (revision 4, not Plus! version) PL/ProMMX can handle the K6-2: the DIP switch setting should be switches 4 and 8 ON (2.2 volts).  For 300 MHz the clock multiplier should be set to 4.5x for 66 MHz boards and 5x for 60 MHz boards."   Also please note that the PL-PRO/MMX Plus! is still in beta testing and is not avaliable at this time.

Because the K6-2 is a new technology, I needed to do the following tests with Wintune 98.  I do not like Wintune 98 as I can no longer save and compare results.  However, to get the AMD K6-2 to be detected correctly I have to use Wintune 98.

I have included results from an Intel 166 MHz processor, an Intel 233 MHz MMX processor and the results from the AMD K6-2 to compare.  I had to use new data for the Intel 233, even though it was the same exact processor and PowerLeap adapter used in part 2 of this review.  The new data was needed since I added more RAM, a new BIOS and I am using Wintune 98 for this test; any combination of these three factors could have contributed to the differences in the test results between the two reviews.  The Intel 233, in part 2 of this review, had  435 for the CPU interger and 131 for the FPU; in this test the Intel 233 scored 648 for the CPU interger and 267 for the FPU.

I cannot be sure if this is a performance increase since the last test or if this is just due to the two versions of Wintune analyzing the CPU differently.  Both could be possiblities, unfortunately I did not do enough testing in between the two reviews.  Sorry.

 

All  tests were done on a PB 640 Motherboard with 256K L2 cache, Diamond Stealth II S220 video card running at 800x600@16bits/pixel, with 64 MB of RAM, Mr. BIOS upgrade and Windows 95 4.0.1111 B fat 32.

	Intel Pentium	Intel Pentium P55C	AMD K6-2	AMD K6-2 Overclocked
Bus Speed/MHz	66/166	66/233	66/298	66/331
MMX	No	Yes	Yes and 3D Now	Yes and 3D Now
CPU Integer (MIPS)	431.3205	647.8273	777.4871	835.3389
CPU Floating Point (MFLOPS)	190.1548	267.3521	346.5536	383.7589
Video(2D) (MPixels/s)	32.10956	36.96548	37.43187	37.54894
Direct3D (MPixels/s)	41.96649	43.1218	43.64595	36.88367
OpenGL (MPixels/s)	4.691871	5.14715	5.369948	5.397748
Memory (MB/s)	142.5385	201.5837	473.4986	512.6618
Cached Disk (MB/s)	23.00382	31.92148	44.05922	40.49335
Uncached Disk (MB/s)	2.19138	2.137197	2.343799	2.325956

As you can see from the data, the AMD K6-2 300 MHz had a performace increase, over an Intel 233, in all categories.  I have chosen to highlight 3 of these results in the chart below.  Also, check out the cached disk performance; it went from 23MB/s with an Intel 166  to 31MB/s with an Intel 233, and up to 44 MB/s for the AMD K6-2 300.  These results are probably related to the memory scores, which you can see on the chart, since the system can cache more of the disk.
  The memory score is a combination of all the memory on the system including the RAM, L1 cache and L2 cache.  I find this increase in the memory score to be the most impressive.  I would guess that this score is so high due to the 64k L1 cache that can be found in the AMD K6-2.  This is more L2 cache than is found in the Intel processors and somehow it must really help the 64 MB of RAM in my system pipeline the data into the processor.

The FPU also had a nice performance increase, going from 190MFLOPS for the Intel 166 to 267 MFLOPS for the Intel 233 and 347 MFLOPS for the AMD K6-2.  Additionally, the the CPU Integer had an increase from 431 MIPS for the Intel 166 to 648 MIPS for the Intel 233 and 778 MIPS for the AMD K6-2.  Both of these had reasonable increases in performance.

I uploaded these results to the online database Wintune 98 has and I found that the AMD K6-2 performs on par with other systems running this same chip at 66 MHz.  I think the Wintune results show that there is no performance decrease from the PowerLeap adapter; the PowerLeap actually provides performace as our motherboards could never use this chip were it not for PowerLeap.