CompuServe Messages

James, ALR was charging $400 for the 386sx module and something kile $2K for the 486 module. Yes, the 486 upgrade was a joke. You did not anything near real 486 class integer performance with it (more like a cached 386DX/25), though the floating point performance was not bad compared to real 486DX/25's. The 386sx module was not such a bad deal at the time. You got performance near the bottom of the 386sx pack with it. The worst "feature" of that machine was the 5MB motherboard memory limit. Any additional memory had to go on an 8MHz ISA card. I think the P24T will surprise a lot of people when and if anybody ever benchmarks the thing. A machine so equipped will run at full Pentium speed as long as it is hitting the internal cache(s?). I also think the P24T will get floating point performance close to that of a real Pentium. Even the ALR Powerflex 486 upgrade gave near normal 486DX performance on floating point. Floating point performance and memory bandwidth are usually fairly independent. The main reason I am skeptical about the Alpha et al is that the differentials in performance between these RISC chips and the Pentium are not that great. The fellow was saying his Alpha was 2.4-3.5 times faster than his 486DX2/66 on heavily floating point stuff. Since the Pentium is easily twice as fast as the 486 on fp, that means his alpha is only 1.2-1.8 times faster than the Pentium. If you can get two pentiums for the price of one Alpha, and rendering is your prime concern, then why not get the two Pentiums? If one computer goes down, you still hav another. And what about the 90 MHz Pentium that is due out any month now? I guess the DEC is a premium enough machine to justify the price diffential. But if I were buying a Pentium now, I'd keep upgradable CPU modules low on the list of value added features. Bailey