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By Kelly Lu (kellylu@onepc.net) - August 27, 2001

Infobox

What? Spectra 400 Product Page Who? Evergreen Technologies Home Page How much? $179.99 USD (MSRP) Buy Now!

So, you've got an old Pentium-based system lying around doing nothing because you can't find anything that will run properly or smoothly on it. What do you do? Upgrade, of course. But how?

Sure, you could always just plug in a newer processor, but the fact remains that the Pentium processor only goes up to 233MHz. Overclocking it won't do the job either, since the best you'll be able to hope for would be around 266MHz with a 233MHz processor. So your only choice would be to strip out the core components such as the motherboard, processor and memory and replace them with newer products… right?

Wrong. Evergreen Technology has made a unique product called the Spectra 400 that will allow you to upgrade your old Pentium-based computer to an AMD K6-2 400MHz processor--and without having to replace anything other than just the CPU itself. Pretty cool, eh?

Well, sort of. Although the Spectra 400 allows you to simply pop in a new processor to be able to enjoy 400MHz of processing glory, there are some serious penalties associated with it--and not only because it is sold for a relatively high price of $179 USD ($129 after an instant rebate).

Actually, the $179 USD price tag is one of the main points that I should mention about the Spectra 400. With the low price of hardware, especially core components such as memory and processors, it seems kind of funny for a company to even think about charging the same price for something that would only theoretically give you half the performance than if you upgrade all the core components as well. So what gives?

Well, the answer lies in the fact that the Spectra 400 is actually designed for users who are not able to rip apart their computer and then be able to put everything back together properly. Believe it or not, and contrary to what most experienced system builders will tell you, putting together a computer from scratch is a lot more complex than one might think. Spending the higher price means that the user will only have to, theoretically, take out their old processor and pop in the new one, which is much easier than ripping everything apart.

Then there's the... you guessed it, performance aspect of just upgrading the processor. See, like the CPU, the platform, composed of the motherboard's chipset as well as the memory that goes along with it, is also being rapidly improved on. So, while you have just doubled or tripled your processor's speed to 400MHz, you're still limited by the old platform of your old processor. This could cause a big performance hit, since your relatively super-fast 400MHz processor will be thirsting for data to be delivered to it from the platform.

By keeping these two factors in mind--that the high price is meant to give novices a chance to upgrade their system themselves and the fact that just upgrading the processor will never yield the same amount of performance as upgrading the platform that it runs on alongside it--let's take a closer look at the Spectra 400.

The Spectra 400 comes with quite a lot of documentation and software for a CPU product. It comes with a user's manual, a quick start poster, a installation disk as well as a complementary installation CD that contains BIOS updates for common computer systems and motherboards. The quick start guide was very well written and it was apparent that it was designed for first-timers, since it goes into a lot of detail into things like how to remove your old processor and how to install the new one.

The actual Spectra 400 processor is actually a combination of a AMD K6-2 400MHz processor that is soldered onto a compatibility adapter. It is this compatibility adapter that allows the AMD K6-2 400MHz processor to be able to function on a Socket 5 or Socket 7 motherboard.

A special heatsink was included with the Spectra 400 package. Since the addition of the compatibility adapter adds a considerable amount of height which would have made any other heatsink to become physically incompatible, it was necessary for Evergreen Technologies to include this heatsink. Although it's not even close to the size of heatsinks that we are now used to seeing with today's processors, it does its job adequately for its intended user-those who wouldn't even think about overclocking.

Installation
Being a product designed for the first-time CPU upgrader, I thought that the Spectra 400 should have been a cinch to install, since I can safely say that I'm far from being a first-time system builder; I was very wrong.

Basically, the installation is supposed to go like this: you pop in the installation floppy disk, it scans your system to see if you need any BIOS updates, you turn off your computer, take out your old processor, stick in the Spectra 400, power up, and you're done. Unfortunately, it didn't exactly happen that way for me.

I do what the quick start guide told me: pop in the installation floppy disk, turn off my computer after it tells me that a BIOS update was not needed, take out my old Pentium MMX 200MHz processor, stick in the Spectra 400 (all the while, cursing at how much work space the person in the photograph in the quick start guide had because they had their motherboard in the open while I had mine crammed into a terribly-designed mid-tower case) and power up. Then, I waited... and I waited... and I waited... nothing! I took everything out again and tried again... nothing. I read through the troubleshooting part of the user's manual three times over... nothing!

I finally gave up and fired off an email to their technical support department, cursing again that they had just closed 10 minutes ago. My reply two days later? "There is a compatibility problem with your specific motherboard."

So, after updating the BIOS for my motherboard, a process that most first-time CPU upgraders will have no clue how to do and will never have thought about in the first place, I finally got it to work.

I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is the definition of "first-timer" someone with 7 years of computer building experience?

Powering Up
After that little installation scenario, I was relieved that the Spectra 400 did, indeed, work. The BIOS detected the processor as an AMD K6-2 400MHz and Windows did so also. Did I notice an immediate improvement in speed? You can say that. The speed improvement wasn't stellar, though, but things were noticeably faster. I let my brother use the machine for a while without telling him about the upgrade being installed and he soon concluded that I had "done something to his computer."

So, with everything in place, let's start benchmarking!

For this review, I pulled out a system that would typically have a similar configuration as something that would be upgraded using the Spectra 400:

Benchmark Results
First up, let's take the Spectra 400 for a spin with SiSoft Sandra 2001te:

Since SiSoft Sandra is very much a component-level benchmark, the above tests only measure the speed of the processor, and not of the system as a whole. In order to benchmark the system as a whole, we must look at the following real-world benchmarks. First up, we measure the business performance with ZD's Content Creation Winstone 2001.

As you can see, the picture changes durastically when we put the Spectra 400 into a real-world situation. While scoring more than double most of the time in SiSoft Sandra, the Spectra only scored a measly 2.1 extra Winstone Units. This is very little, considering that it runs at double the frequency of the Pentium MMX 200MHz.

Let's take a look at real-world gaming performance with a moderately-old game, Descent 3:

Ok, so we increase the clock speed by 100%, and we get a 10% increase in gaming performance. That doesn't sound right. Well, believe it or not, it's true! The Spectra 400 only gave me a 10% increase in FPS! Of course, these results might be limited by the older video card that I had in there, the ATI Xpert 98, but most people who plan to use this product will have a similar, if not, worser, card, so my results stand as valid.

The above results clearly proves that my prediction in the introduction of this review is correct. Although the Spectra 400 allows any old Pentium-based computer to run a 400MHz CPU, the older platform that is left behind will be the limiting factor. Thus, the relatively super-fast Spectra 400 is always waiting for the platform to deliver it data to process. This is clearly so because, by just testing the processor as we did with SiSoft Sandra, we noticed a HUGE performance increase, but by including the rest of the system's components into the benchmark, we see that the performance is very little in relation to the frequency increase.

The Spectra 400 is specifically designed for users who are not comfortable with ripping apart and then putting back together their computer since, for a similar price, a more experienced user can put together something that would give them double, triple or even quadruple the performance of the Spectra 400. Plus, as mentioned before, an upgrade product such as the Spectra 400 will never give a user the same performance boost as a regular upgrade with the same processor along with a new motherboard and memory would-and our benchmarks proved that fact quite well. Time and time again, we saw the Spectra 400 give us only a slight performance boost when compared to a computer running at half the frequency of it. For the price--and the hassle, in mine, and I'm sure others', specific cases--the Spectra 400 is simply not worth it.

Pros Designed so that user will not have to take apart their entire computer Cons Relatively high price; same price can buy much better components if doing a regular upgrade (-1.0) System/motherboard-specific installation problems; not mentioned unless the user runs into the problem and asks technical support (-0.5) Poor performance increase (-1.5)

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