K6-2 and K6-3 Upgrade Guide

Memory Upgrade - Content Creation Performance

With more memory becoming standard in systems, the 64MB of memory found in our base system is quite possibly a bottleneck. Let's see what kind of performance can be gained by adding an additional 64MB of memory in our base system for a total of 128MB.

In SYSMark 2000, we can see how 2D application performance increases with the additional 64MB of memory. In the case of our base system, the K6-2 300 MHz, the addition of 64MB of memory results in a 14% increase in speed. For the K6-3 450 MHz, the extra memory yields a 13% increase. Thus we can estimate that in SYSMark 2000, performance will increase by 13.5% on any K6 series processor when going form 64MB of memory to 128MB of memory.

When in a multitasking situation, the addition of memory results in an outcome very similar to that of the SYSMark 2000 test. The K6-2 300 MHz gains 12% performance and the K6-3 450 MHz gains 19%. One thing to note is how the K6-3 450 MHz results model what we would expect from the processor, unlike the previous results seen in the CPU upgrade section. This we can determine our previous bottleneck to be the system memory, as 64MB of memory was holding the K6-3 450 MHz from reaching its full potential in the Content Creation Winstone test.