Introduction
Last week I received a new 6x86MX CPU that turned out to be very overclockable. We are all very interested how higher clock speed 6x86MX CPUs will perform and this page shall give you only some ideas how it will look.
I performed the test on a AOpen AX5T rev. 3 , which is one of the fastest Socket 7 motherboards and also capable of 83 MHz bus speed. This board is also running very stable, which makes it to one of the best ‘overclocking motherboards’.
This page is not meant to be particulaly comprehensive, because I will do the detailed testing of the 6x86MX on my upcoming new CPU Guide.
Windows 95 Performance
Business applications under Windows 95 is where the 6x86MX performs particularly well, as you could already see on my 6x86MX Review Page. The 225/75 MHz version will be called PR266 for a reason, because it’s just as fast as the Pentium II at 266 MHz. I’d say that this is an impressive performance indeed. We could also already see in my previous review that the bus speed doesn’t have the same high impact as on the Intel Pentium and the AMD K6. A 6x86MX at 208 MHz with a bus speed of 83 MHz is definitely slower than at 225 MHz. You can also see that a 200 MHz version will hardly perform better than the known PR233 (187.5/75 MHz) version. Cyrix/IBM could release this CPU under the same PR rating only for people that want to avoid 75 MHz bus speed. Unfortunately there was no chance to run the 6×86 I tested at 233/66 MHz, it would crash each time I tried. However can we expect the 233 MHz version to perform pretty much the same as the 225 Mhz version, which would be a 66 Mhz bus speed alternative for the PR266.
Windows NT 4 Performance
Under NT the 6×86 isn’t quite as great, but the PR266 will still be able to compare to the Pentium II 233.
FPU Performance
To make an end with all these discussions on the web about ‘real’ or ‘raw’ or whatever FPU performance which still isn’t any help at all for people who need real world information about what the number cruncher of a CPU can do, I decided to use 3D Studio Max, which highly depends on the FPU of a processor. This is a real world application so I don’t want to hear any stories about ‘how the FPU is used’. Whoever needs rendering with his system couldn’t care less about ‘how the FPU is used’ but wants to know which CPU he needs to wait least. This is what this benchmark will tell you.
Please note that less is better in this one !!
These results show us several things. First of all that the FPU performace is obviously depending on the CPUs clock speed and hardly touched by the bus speed. This is logical, since the FPU is not struggling to get data over the bus, but heavily calculating CPU internally. The next thing we can see is that the 6x86MX FPU is still some kind of sad story. Even the K6, which itself is not exactly a FPU racer is considerably sooner finished with the Kinetix logo scene than the upcoming 6x86MX PR266. The Pentium Pro 200 renders this scene in even half the time of the 6x86MX PR233. The Pentium II 300 needs actually only 122 seconds, less than half of the time the 6x86MX PR266 will need.
Summary
Well, there isn’t really that much to say. The 6x86MX PR266, expected in the fourth quarter of this year, will have an impressive Windows 95 business application performance, will perform quite well under Windows NT as well, but won’t be interesting to anybody who needs a powerful FPU.
