Windows 98 Examination

User-level examination

At some point, you're going to actually have to get past BIOS and move on to the OS. Finally allowing the boot process to complete, and proceeded to load up Windows 98. So far, so good. A quick look at the system properties tab revealed a slightly modified OEM screen.

Winbench System Info Results

In an effort to find out a little more about the K7, as well as begin our benchmark tests, we installed and loaded up WinBench 99 1.1, and launched the System Information window.

Winbench System Info

As expected, the CPU name displays AMD-K7tm, and repeats the 6/0/5 family/model/stepping we saw in BIOS. CPU speed is confirmed at 550MHz, and L1 cache is an enormous 128KB. What's interesting is the lack of information on the K7's L2 cache, which is reported in the BIOS as 1/3 speed 512KB, consistent with expectations on a consumer-end K7.

WinBench currently takes no advantage of AMD's 3DNow! Extensions (or Intel's Streaming SIMD at that), so the only processor extensions we see supported is MMX, implemented since the K6. Having had enough with random screenshots, we proceeded to start running some tests.

All tests were run 4 times and averaged between all scores.