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Mike,
I had a chance to run some benchmarks on the Orange Micro OrangePC 660 and PCfx!. I purchased a PCfx! which I returned for the OrangePC 660 and then upgraded with a AMD K6-2/400. [Note: the fastest AMD K6/2 CPU I know of (and listed at Orange Micro's ordering page) is a 350MHz part. Not sure if the "400" is a typo or one of the 'ratings index' that is often used by AMD and Cyrix - where they listed the equivalent (in their minds) Intel CPU speed rating is given.-Mike] Maybe this will help shed some light on the problems that Rob Huigsloot has reported.
The Orange Micro PCfx! is simply the OrangePC 660 with the L2 cache removed and a fixed (not upgradable) IDT WinChip/200 processor.
ZD WinBench 99 was used. CPUmark32 gives a good estimation of overall general Windows performance. FPUWinMark gives an idea of game computational performance. Neither benchmark can utilize the 3DNow! features of the AMD K6-2 which can additionally boost games that are optimized for it. [Note: AMD's std Floating Point (FPU) performance trails that of the equiv. Intel CPU but if software utilizes the 3DNow! extensions in the K6-2 then performance is dramatically different. 3DNow! uses SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) pipeline which is similar to what Intel plans to add in their much improved Katmai PII early next year (but Katmai may have dual SIMD pipelines for twice the performance)-Mike]
| Card Tested | CPUmark32 | FPUWinMark |
| OrangePC 660 with AMD K6-2/400 @100 MHz bus, L2 cache | 881 | 1300 |
| OrangePC 660 with AMD K6-2/400 @ 66 MHz bus, L2 cache | 709 | 1287 |
| OrangePC 660 with AMD K6-2/400 @ 66 MHz bus | 473 | 1258 |
| OrangePC 660 with AMD K6-2/200 @ 66 MHz bus | 363 | 640 |
| PCfx! with IDT WinChip/200 @ 66 MHz bus | 299 | 320 |
Overall almost 3 times better performance with OrangePC 660 K6-2/400 over PCfx! In gaming specific situations over 4 times better performance!
A K6-2 is 21% faster than the same speed WinChip. Double the internal processor frequency and it boosts performance by 30%. Add L2 cache [256K I believe-Mike] and performance increases by a huge 50%! Running at 100 MHz bus instead of 66 MHz gives another 24% increase.
In floating point calculations the K6-2 is 100% faster than a WinChip! Double the internal processor frequency and it boosts performance by 97%.
A disappointed PCfx! user, but impressed OrangePC 660 user.
Tom Berg
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I've asked Tom for some other test results such as game performance. I'll update the page with any new results received. I've also asked Tom if the 660 requires the adjacent PCI slot to be free.
