At our June 10^th group meeting, a representative from IDT/Centaur, Mike Bruzzone, spoke about the new Win Chip or C-6 processor. Two chips with a board were offered to the group for evaluation, and I was one of the ones to receive a Win Chip Processor for evaluation.

The processor I received was one of the 225Mhz ones with a Tyan motherboard. I purchased all parts for the test system new so as to limit any hardware problems later on down the road. I purchased a Samsung 2.1 gig hard drive, 32meg SDRAM memory, a Trident 4meg AGP video card, U.S. Drives 24X CD-ROM, Ensonic PCI sound card, a Diamond 56K V.90 PCI modem, and a new ATX case. The only things used were my PS2 mouse and keyboard and a Maxtech 15" monitor.

I had no difficulty installing any of the components. I always build a system one piece at a time starting with the motherboard/processor, video card, and memory; I tend to stop after each component and turn on the power. This way if a problem develops I can isolate the newest component to see if it is defective or just causing a conflict with another device. After a bare bones construction of motherboard, Win Chip, memory, hard drive and video card, I did a bare system format of the hard drive. This was just enough to start up the system and check the functionality of the primary components. The bios recognized the Win Chip right off and booted to the hard drive without a hiccup. I next installed the 24X CD and loaded its DOS drivers and copied the setup files from the Windows 95 CD. As a rule I load the necessary files from the Windows 95 CD onto the hard drive and install from there. This allows me to change or add system settings on the fly without the need to swap out CDs. This also allows me to check the function of the CD in DOS mode just to be sure it works.

A new, clean, installation of Windows 95 ran fine on the first attempt, so I began to add the rest of my components. An Ensonic PCI sound card and Diamond PCI 56k modem rounded out my hardware. Again, all the new components installed and worked properly. A brief note about PCI modems. Windows 95 and 98 will install these cards and will not give any indication that there is a problem. A quick check of the System Properties box will not show any conflicting ports or memory addresses. However, the modem will fail to initialize in some cases. If you should ever have this problem, either disable one of the two serial ports from the motherboard in the bios, or go to the Control Panel \ Add Hardware button and add one or two more Comm ports to the system configuration before physically reinstalling the card and drivers. This error doesn’t happen often, but it has happened enough for me to be cautious building a system.

I was able to run Windows 95 on the Win Chip without problems. I ran through all the accompanying programs that come with Windows and left it running for a week with various system utilities set to run during the day. I never had a system crash or lock up, and the processor showed no signs of over heating. Next, I loaded up Microsoft Office. Again, everything worked well. Word, Excel, and Power Point all responded without hang-ups. Internet access was not affected by the C-6. I used both AOL and Mindspring for Internet access with both Netscape and Internet Explorer running as browsers at different times. I didn’t experience any difference in performance with any combination of these programs. I then loaded up a copy of Quick Books and ran my bank statements from the last year through it. (Had to do it sometime.) I left the machine running the whole time to look for any instability. Even though I still can’t balance my checkbook, I didn’t experience any problems with any of the programs I installed. The most remarkable thing I can say for the C-6 was that it didn’t cause me any trouble up to this point. The whole experience had been remarkably uneventful.

Finally, I came across something the Win Chip couldn’t handle: Games! Now, I know some of you don’t think the use of games is important to the overall computer industry, but just look at all the money Americans spend on computer gaming every year. And I guarantee that any computer system you could possibly imaging will at some time have games running on it. I have a benchmark demo of Forsaken and Quake II that I used for my test. Forsaken refused to run at all beyond the introduction. Quake II was unstable at a resolution higher than 400 X 300. Even at low resolution, frame rates were never higher than 15 to 25 fps. I installed an Intel 233MMX chip into the motherboard at the end of the test, to see if my problems were video card related, but these games ran appropriately with the Intel chip.