Unfortunately, Duncan is not the only former Cyrix enthusiast around here. Over the last several years I have been responsible for recommending and or building about a dozen Cyrix CPU systems, and in the past there was never a problem and each CPU saved at least $100, but I have had a few bad experiences in a row now and actually feel embarrassed to have recommended the Cyrix chip to others in a couple of cases where they only save a handful of dollars now. I had been meaning to post about this, so the current discussion seems like a really good time to. So here's why:
1) INCOMPATIBLE
Well, this may be the the fault of poor programming rather than poor Cyrix design, however this still is something that wouldn't have happened if I didn't buy Cyrix. It seems there is a programming library (or maybe a lot of programmers make this mistake on their own?) which detects Cyrix M1 as an MMX CPU. I was hit with this twice. Banshee drivers did this, and so did this program called Wavetop. Installation in each case caused Windows to report protection error and not boot. Fortunately Creative had released drivers to fix this the day before, and WaveTop was aware of this problem. Still, it cost me a lot of time and stress and I incurred the monetary cost of a long distance call.
2) DEFECTIVE (AND/OR EXTREMELY INCOMPATIBLE)
Previously on this thread it has been said by many "don't blame the CPU". In fact the message I am replying to more or less says that. And it is usually good advice in my opinion. But not this time....
So my computer knowledgeable friend wanted to build a system, asks me to recommend parts, and I tell him MII-300 and FIC 503+. He puts it together and all looks well except for one thing-- instead of displaying pictures, IE4 displays purple lines of various shades. Netscape is not affected. Must be the AGP drivers, right? Nope. The video card (Matrox G100 AGP) drivers? Nope. BIOS? Didn't help. Defective MB/Video Card? Replaced them both with same make, that didn't work. Replaced vid card with PCI S3 Virge, still have purple lines in IE. So after months of me telling my friend he probably had something set incorrectly and both of us losing hair over this, I take a trip to his house and swap a different chip (M1) into his system, and his MII-300 into another working system (ABIT MB with MII-200). Well, I'm sure anyone reading this knows what happened by now.... the purple lines mysteriously moved to the second system. Looks like a dud chip which made it through the Cyrix testing process. The cost of saving $30 over a K6-2? Half a year of aggravation plus the cost of a new CPU (needless to say, AMD not Cyrix). Not good.
3) Flaky
This addresses the "they just crash more" argument. I agree. I don't know what headway CPU's are supposed to have when they are assigned a speed, but for the last year or so Cyrix has been cutting it extremely close. Their chips are labelled 75*2 or 75*3 rather than 66*2.5 or 66*3.5 for a very good reason-- the chips simply don't work at the slightly higher speeds. Try to run them at the latter speeds to get better PCI stability, and you will get crashes, scrambled registries, etc. Well, 166 is over 10% more than 150, so maybe that is the safety margin I used up. But 233 is only 3.5% faster than 225, and it is not quite stable on my ABIT PX5 (Cyrix was the only upgrade for me w/o getting a new MB, and for $41 I figured I would overlook the Cyrix problems I had witnessed). I could not get my machine to boot windows completely at 250 (83*3.... by comparison my old Pentium 133 CPU loved 83*2). At 240 (66*1.03*3.5) it was extremely unreliable, and at 233 just flaky. All this is with a very powerful CPU fan, CPU Idle (very nice and stable for me), and my case opened during the winter (72F inside). Is this thing even going to work at all at 225 come summer? without CPU Idle? With my case closed? Even now I am getting too many crashes at 225, so I am considering underclocking it. The other system in my house is AMD, and it is rock solid, even with a 5% overclock. By the way, for anyone wondering, both MII-300 I have referred to so far are gold top.
Now that CPU's of all brands can be had for less than $60, I would say it is silly to sacrifice both speed and reliability for fifteen bucks. There are millions of little things which can go wrong with CPUs, and it is impossible for an individual to properly diagnose a CPU, so at the least buy one only if it is in something like a Compaq which you can take back to the store.... and oh yeah, buy it during the summer so then you know winter will only be better.
Sorry to have to report these things,
--Scott |
