AMD's K6-2+ in Notebooks - Evaluating Performance with PowerNow

Office Performance with PowerNow!

Office applications should be where the PowerNow! Auto setting will definitely come in handy, the reason being that it doesn't take much CPU power to get the most performance out of these applications and which allows the K6-2+ to underclock itself for most of the time while running these types of applications.

Under the Microsoft Word 2000 benchmark script, the performance difference between the Auto setting and the Max Performance settings is basically nonexistent. At the same time, leaving the laptop in Auto mode increased battery life by 21% over the Max Performance setting.

However, for an application as simple as Word or any other word processing program, you'll probably want to kick down to the Max Battery Life mode which adds a considerable amount of battery life while taking a performance hit that doesn't matter all too much.

Excel begins to show some of the sacrifice you make for increased battery life as the K6-2+ 550 in Auto PowerNow! mode yielded a 10% lower score than the system in Max Performance mode. Since functions in Excel or any spreadsheet program for that matter are inherently more complex than their counterparts in a word processing program there's obviously more of a performance penalty you pay for enabling PowerNow! However, the 10% performance drop is probably worth the 21% increase in battery life.

There's a similar tradeoff that occurs under PowerPoint 2000, you gain the battery life, but you lose around 10% of the performance.

Again, we're seeing around a 10% drop in performance in Auto mode, not bad at all considering the type of improvement in battery life you're getting. There is a much more noticeable difference in performance between the Performance and Auto settings, and the Max Battery Life setting, for obvious reasons, in the case of the latter, the CPU is only running at 200MHz.