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It arrived the next working day after I ordered online. I have to say, I just love ordering online! Its great, you can always find what you want for a cheap price and get it quickly. I order everything I can online, my bit for supporting Internet commerce I guess. Well I opened the packet and out plopped a manual, quick start sheet, a disk, a CD-ROM and a processor. The OverDrive has a fan integrated on it along with some circuitry to convert the voltage down as it runs on only 3.3V opposed to the current 5V. I ran the disk which installed a little file into Win95 to make it MMX friendly and then informed me of my current performance benchmark. "Be sure to run this after the upgrade to see the improvement!" it cheerfully reminded me. I opened the PC up as a feeling of doom came over me. My law of PC upgrades is "Unless its a modem it never works first time." This certainly wasn't a modem and I was hoping it wouldn't blow up my motherboard if something did go wrong. I lifted the little lever and out popped the chip (after my first having grappled with the heatsink/fan on top). I snipped the fan cables and cleared the area for the OverDrive. Then I struggled with the packet containing the new chip. Finally it popped open to send the chip flying up in the air. I was already thinking of excuses as it began to fall towards the desk. It had arrived damaged...yes, that was it! It landed. Everything seemed ok, but I was sure something had broken inside the circuitry glued above the chip. I tried putting it in the socket, it didn't fit. Was my socket wrong? No, some pins were bent - I quickly nudged them back in line and the chip slid into place. I lowered the lever, locking things into place. I painfully started the computer, cringing at the possibilities. But it booted up, quickly I noted, and worked just fine. One huge sigh of relief later I reinserted the disk. It came up with all these numbers which were supposed to tell me that the computer was running faster but I didn't understand them so I just benchmarked with the Word 6.0, FrontPage 97 and Communicator 4.01a startup timing test. Yep, a definite, though not massive, improvement. Very well. My only worry was that the Intel disk diagnosed the processor as 150Mhz. I wasn't going to play around with jumpers as the motherboard manual was a dodgy Chinese translation, so I'll just stay with 150Mhz, if that's what it is. I'm happy with the improvement I gained from a £160 pound (or so) investment but the thing consumers need to remember is that the performance of the computer is a factor of so much more than just the processor. The size of the cache, the speed of the hard disk, the size and speed of the buses, the quality of the graphics card, the amount of RAM and video RAM among other things all have a huge part to play. Even the fastest processor in the world will have a minimal effect on the speed of a game running from a 1 speed CD-ROM drive. So upgrading your processor can help but remember it is a retro-fit. The motherboard isn't really designed to take it and you may find that, like me, you spend a lot of time waiting for your hard disk to catch up. Thankfully I ordered wide SCSI and a 7200 RPM hard disk on my new computer. Its a luxury worth paying for if you do a lot of disk intensive work. |
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© 1997 j-dom media. contact us. |
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by Jason P. Kitcat [e-mail him] |
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