Wesley's Tool-Box

• The Champion - Alpha PAL6035

 PAL6035 is a socket HSF from Japan's Alpha Company Ltd.. Alpha has been producing high quality heatsinks with their 'microforging' technology(hence the URL) that enables them to make create heatsinks of efficient shapes since 1989. PAL6035 is one of the top performing heatsinks they offer, second only to PEP66. Here are some key specs of PAL6035:

Specification
Dimensions(mm):	60 x 60 x 35
Mass (grams):	175
Cooling Fan:	Sanyo Denki 60mm
Fan Speed(rpm):	3800
Fan Power(cfm):	20.0
Thermal Resistance:	0.37 C/W

 The specifications reveal that the heatsink is quite a competent model, and it has consistently proven to be well-performing throughout various tests performed by hardware sites such as HardOCP or Tom's Hardware. So we can say it is a good 'reference' high-performance HSF.

• PAL6035's Packaging

 Alpha PAL6035 comes completely unassembled, in part because you assemble the heatsink as you install it on the CPU. In the picture, you see the black-anodized heatsink with Alpha's unique copper-plated bottom. You also see the heatsink cover for effective airflow, as well as the 20cfm Sanyo Denki 60mm fan. This fan is standard part of the PAL6035MUC package that Alpha sells directly. If you get PAL6035 from other places, it may be replaced with different fans. The clip shown here is the old kind, and Alpha has updated the clip for better compatibility with AMD's SocketA CPUs. However, with a bit of bending, the old clip works with SocketA fine. To wrap up the packaging, there is a set of screws for attaching the fan onto the heatsink and Alpha brand thermal grease in a tube.

• PAL6035 Installation

 Installing Alpha is something of moderate difficulty, but not confusing. First you put the clip into the heatsink, then attach it onto the processor. Depending on how dexterous the person is, you can push the clip down with a finger and snap it into place, or a small flathead driver may be necessary to aide/guide the clip in. That's the hard part. Then you put on the cover and screw on the fan to finish installation to get it look like the picture above. Unlike the picture, you have to plug the fan connector in to get it work, of course.

 Now let's take a look at the contender.

• CPUs are Getting Hotter

 Heat in computers have always posed problems to a certain degree. Preliminary electronic computers using vacuum tubes such as ENIAC could not run for more than 30 minutes easily due to burnouts of overheating tubes. Mainframe computers usually operated in air-conditioned rooms. Some modern super-computers operate suspended in a case filled with inert liquid coolant.

 However, personal computers traditionally had few heat-related problems because the components never ran fast or hot compared to the state-of-the-art technologies that existed at the time. Few, if any, systems with heatsinks on a 286 or 386 chips appeared, for the chips were only warm to the touch during normal operation.

 This trend started to change at around the propagation of 486 chips. They were already becoming too hot to touch, and faster versions of 486 started to have heatsink attached on the ceramic package. The Pentium Overdrive processor, shown on the left and plugged into a 486 system, shows such examples of early heatsink coupled CPUs. First Pentium CPUs, the 60MHz and 66MHz versions, were notorious for excessive heat dissipation and was one of the first personal computer CPUs requiring active cooling by motorized fan. Since then, HeatSink-Fan combo(HSF) became standard attachment to CPU.

 The problem did not end there, though. Personal computer CPU development was accelerating day by day and introduction of ever-so-powerful CPUs were frequent. Processing power-wise, top-of-the-line CPUs today are comparable to top 100 supercomputers of only 4 to 5 years ago. In consequence, CPU's heat dissipation rate gradually increased. Smaller manufacturing process does help CPU produce less heat, but this does not help much in reducing the heat dissipation of the most powerful processor on the market. This is because the operating frequency is increasing at a faster rate. One of the hottest(literally and figuratively) chip of today, AMD's 'Thunderbird' Athlon can run without any discernible heat if you run it at 66MHz like the aforementioned early Pentiums. But you don't run Athlon at 66MHz in reality; you run it at up to 1.2GHz, almost 20 times of the Pentium speed.

 Where does all this lead to? Need for better and better HSFs. Some overclockers go so far as to install thermoelectric modules(a.k.a. Peltiers) or water cooling on the CPU, and a few extremists even attempts to dip the system in liquid nitrogen to obtain ultimate cooling. This cannot be the solution for everyone, though, because installation of such things without good background knowledge and caution can ruin the whole system. Companies like VapoChill offers powerful cooling solution by effectively bringing in a small refrigerator into the computer case. This method may be safer, but this is out of reach for many, because the cost is too high.

 And so, in today's article, I have compared two heatsinks deemed to be among the most powerful HSF solutions out there.

• 3D Benches

Benchmark		Celeron	Cyrix III
		466MHz	533MHz	600MHz
3DMark 2000	Overall (1024x768 16bit)	1234	972	1029
	CPU Speed	69	50	53
Quake3 Arena v1.11 (fps)	640x480 HQ	35.0	24.0	25.9
	800x600 HQ	23.6	21.6	22.9
	1024x768 HQ	15.0	15.0	16.2

Let's now look at 3D performance. Duron benchmarks are not available because they were not tested with the same video card. As expected, Celeron easily beats Cyrix III again, despite the fact that Celeron being benchmarked was clocked 12% lower. Take a look at Quake 3 Arena's 640x480 results, which are heavily influenced by CPU performance because it is relatively low-bandwidth, and video card chipset's speed or other subsystem is not much of a bottleneck. That's right - since Q3A's not heavily 3DNow! optimized, Cyrix III's weak FPU performance shows through. In case of 1024x768, though, because of the FSB being twice as wide as Celeron, the score gets slightly better, covering the deficiency in raw power.

This just goes on to show that Cyrix III is certainly NOT meant for gaming. If you're planning to build a cheap, but capable gaming system, there's no better choice than Duron, which is only about $30 more expensive and should offer better performance than even Celeron shown here.

• Conclusions and Other Comments

 

The screen above was taken at the boot time when testing Cyrix III 600MHz. You can see Cyrix III's name on the screen here, but I couldn't get this nor get the system to boot at all. Why? Because BIOS was a bit old and couldn't recognize the chip. Thankfully, I was able to get a more recent BIOS supporting Cyrix III and was able to continue the testing. Just a reminder for those of you planning to get a Cyrix III - get the BIOS updated first.

Alrighty.. This review was meant to be a short 2-page review... sigh. But it is not, as you can see... It's a good thing I'm finally on the last page. Now for the conclusion. For people in the business who'd like to get their systems as cheap as possible should get this chip. As an added bonus(?), the employees would be discouraged from playing games at work while not affecting productivity of the usual business applications. For the average users and people who are already enthusiastic of the computer hardware so much that he/she was actually able to visit/read this page should avoid this chip like plague.

Having said that, you'd probably wonder why I would devote twice the amount of pages to show you such a terrible CPU at work. This is because I was so frustrated in reviewing the chip that I wanted to show you everything I thought about it. Pull out the benchmarks and this could've been a rant. Yawn.. I need sleep again. Oh, yeah, don't forget to type away your opinions on the discussion board!

• System Configuration

CPU:	Celeron & Cyrix III
M/B:	MSI MS-6309 (VIA 694x chipset) - VIA 4-in-1 v4.24a -
Cooling:	Standard Intel Heatsink/Fan
RAM:	64MB x 2 Samsung PC-100 CAS3 SDRAM
Video:	MSI MS-8808 (NVIDIA Riva TNT2 m64) - NVIDIA Det. v6.26 -
OS:	Windows 98 - Version 4.10.1998, Korean -
Else:	DirectX 8 beta2 build 146 installed

• Synthetic Benches

Benchmark		Celeron	Cyrix III		Duron
		466MHz	533MHz	600MHz	650MHz
d.net client	RC5 Long, opt.core (MKeys/s)	1.312	0.650	0.731	2.230
Sandra 2000 7.6.49	Dhrystone (MIPS)	1262	600	667	1855
	Whetstone (MFLOPS)	627	174	199	876
	Multimedia ALU (it/s)	1438 (MMX)	578 (MMX)	650 (MMX)	2150 (MMX)
	Multimedia FPU (it/s)	670 (FPU)	889 (3DNow!)	1001 (3DNow!)	2751 (3DNow!)
	Memory ALU (MB/s)	122	112	115	423
	Memory FPU (MB/s)	135	166	164	531

Duron benchmarks come from earlier article for reference. What do we have here? Cyrix III's performance is not only easily beaten by a Celeron of lower MHz, but it gets run over flat by other 'value' chip, AMD Duron. A Celeron 466 is posting up to twice the speed of a Cyrix III 600. This is certainly not good. If you look at the Whetstone(FPU) benchmark, Cyrix III's FPU is simply jaw-dropping(the other way around). It is somehow overcome with the implementing 3DNow!, as Multimedia FPU benchmark shows much better score. However, this means that unless an FPU-intensive program such as a game supports 3DNow! well, expect incredible slowdowns.

These results were not very far from the expectations, but as you can see, VIA's decisions on choosing MHz over performance is having some serious whiplash. It's just sad that many customers may fall victim to the 'MHz sells' scheme. The impact is vastly more serious when comparing Cyrix III with AMD's Duron. Once upon a time (about 2 years ago) AMD and Cyrix's offerings had relatively similar performance in general. Now, Duron outperforms Cyrix by about three times on average! Despite the fact that both chips are competing in the same market segment, comparing Durons to Cyrix III looks almost wrong.

What if you take the actual selling price to account? Cyrix III is expected to be selling at around $60 for 600MHz version. Since Celeron sells for about $90~100 for the same MHz, price-performance ratio is similar or slightly bad for Cyrix III. This fact is rather fortunate for Cyrix III, because in the area where raw CPU performance doesn't matter much, such as in general business environment, this looks attractive - you get the performance that you only paid for. The local distributor is not dumb, and this is exactly where they'll focus on the sales of the chip.

• It's a Cyrix, Only that IT ISN'T

Quite a few things have been changed to Cyrix since last year and some of them are obvious on the picture above. You can click on the picture for bigger image. First of all, since VIA owns Cyrix now, the company that produces the chip is VIA, and Cyrix is now just the brand of the chip itself. And why is it 'III' when where weren't a 'Cyrix I' or 'Cyrix II' before? It's possibly because the last Cyrix chip was M-II, which is now marketed as 'VIA Cyrix MII'. Also noticeable is the disappearance of the 'PR' speed rating system which followed with Cyrix chips and for a short time, AMD chips. Now Cyrix is 'proudly' showing its true MHz speed. Let's have a look at the chip's features.

 

Interface:	Intel's Socket 370
FSB:	133MHz or 100MHz
L1 Cache:	128KB
Inst.Sets:	MMX, 3DNow!
Power:	10W Average
Mfg.Process:	0.18 micron
Availablility:	500, 533, 600MHz

As you can see, Cyrix III is to be plugged into Socket 370, so it's trying to compete directly with Intel's Celeron processor. This move from aging Socket7(or Super7) to widespread Socket 370 means that Cyrix III may please many users as an upgrade option. Support for MMX and 3DNow! would provide decent boost in speed where it's supported, but unfortunately, lack of SSE support means it may fall short of newer Celerons with Coppermine core ('Celemine') which support it. Supporting 100MHz or 133MHz FSB is impressive, nevertheless, because Celerons only support 66MHz. The chips reviewed (533MHz, 600MHz) support 133MHz FSB, while the remaining one (500MHz) supports 100MHz FSB.

But do you spot something missing here? If you've seen the features of the chips that came out since 1999, you should know. This processor does NOT have integrated L2 cache. This is a bigger problem than it was back in Socket7 days when chips with integrated L2 cache was generally non-existent (excluding hard-to-produce AMD K6-III); on a Socket7 motherboard, you can find around 256KB to 2MB of L2 cache installed, but on a Socket 370 motherboard, there is no L2 cache installed because it assumes that the installed CPU already has one. With today's CPUs far outrunning memory in terms of speed, having L2 cache to buffer the memory is crucial in boosting performance. The lack of it in Cyrix III is a rather big mistake.

• Something's Missing Here...

Actually, the original chip that was to become Cyrix III, codenamed Joshua and in development at Cyrix at the time of VIA's acquisition, DID have integrated L2 cache. This chip still used the PR speed rating system, but if you drop the PR and put it head-to-head with Celeron, it gave Celeron run for its money, MHz for MHz. What happened now? VIA decided to throw away the original Cyrix Joshua core with Centaur(as I've noted last page, also acquired by VIA) WinChip-based core. WinChip's design lacks L2 cache, is known to have unspectacular performance, but does consume less power, as it is evident on the feature list.

The reason behind this 'stupid' decision is that VIA succumbed to the industry-wide belief that 'the MHz sells' - no matter what the actual performance of the chip is, customers regard MHz as the sole rule of speed and buys whatever that has faster MHz. This is sadly true, even though many power users know this is basically wrong. Centaur design yields higher MHz than Cyrix design (you see a 600MHz version for this review, but the original Cyrix design hardly went beyond 400MHz) even though the actual performance suffers. Because MHz yield is better, VIA was able to take off the PR system from the chip.

To wrap up, you can see that what I have here for the review is not really a 'Cyrix' - manufactured by VIA, based on Centaur design, and plugs into an Intel platform. The only thing 'Cyrix' about this chip is the name. Okay. Now that I've bored you enough, I'll move straight to the benchmark!