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On ABC's very successful sitcom, Home Improvement, comedian Tim Allen's solution to every problem is to add "more power!" If the dishwasher fails to get the dishes clean enough, replacing the electric motor with an engine from a Volkswagen can't help but improve the situation.
This brute force approach provides us with plenty of chuckles when it's carried to the extreme, but it probably wouldn't be quite so humorous if all of us didn't occasionally fall prey to the same syndrome. And nowhere is this easier to do than with PCs. When things start to slow down a little, our first inclination is to cast envious glances at the newest, fastest, and most powerful computers on the market. And when we're talking fast and powerful these days, we're talking Intel's Pentium Processor CPU. Introduced last year, but only recently becoming available in large quantities, this newest member of the Intel CPU family promises great leaps in performance over the now mundane and commonplace 486s. It's easy to get excited about the technology of the new chips. Superscalar architecture, instruction pipelining, and increased internal caching all contribute to improved performance. At least they do on paper. With prices for Pentium systems falling well under $3,000, we wanted to see if they really do offer enough gains in real-world performance to justify their somewhat higher price.
NOT TWINS...IDENTICAL COUSINS
With the cooperation of popular PC vendor Gateway 2000, putting Pentiums to the test turned out to be a fairly manageable task. Over the last several years, Gateway 2000 has developed into one of the larger vendors selling directly to the private and corporate PC user. To aid us in comparing a Pentium-based PC against a similar high-end 486, the company gave us two identically configured PCs. Or at least they were as identical as possible given that each was based on a different CPU. The lower end of the two systems could only be considered low-end when compared against a Pentium. With an Intel 486 DX2 CPU running at 66MHz, this processor is the most powerful 486 CPU available until Intel and others start providing their 99MHz clock-tripled 486s in quantity. The motherboard for this system was based on the VESA local-bus standard, the most popular...