BIG TECH QUESTION!

[androsovic]

Answer this and you shall receive a most wodnerful gift.

Would a IBM 80386DX running at 60Mhz and running DOS 5.0 be comaparably faster than or equal to  or less than a Duron 700Mhz running WinXp and/or what speed processor will it be equal to or faster than.                    

[richjob]

The fastest the 386 chips went without overclocking was 40 mhz.

"Comparative speed"is a relative term.  You cannot compare a GUI-heavy OS like XP with a command line-based environment like DOS.  Command lines are ALWAYS faster.

The problem you may run into with your DOS apps running at 700MHZ is that they will crash because some of that code was never designed to run at 700 mhz.  You get it in games a good bit.  Actually, if you wanted to run DOS stuff now, your best bet MIGHT be DOSEMU under Linux or FreeDos.

Maybe the comparison should be with FreeDos and XP, since the code is about the same age (closer than twelvce years, at any rate)                    

[androsovic]

yea i made a mistake with the 386,i meant to put 486

well whaz the answer for the comparison with this Freedos and xp?                    

[Bsensei]

Only rich could answer that                    

[TrinireturnofGamez]

ummmmm no......
 
 it will load faster.... respond faster..... open certain programs faster...

 but it doesn't even have an AGP slot... so. your screwed for gaming...
  you would probably get 0.1 frame per second in Q2 running in software...                    

[richjob]

yea i made a mistake with the 386,i meant to put 486

well whaz the answer for the comparison with this Freedos and xp?

:ROFL:

Freedos has less cruft and graphics overhead.  XP feels slow because it has to work with a bunch of GUI thingies to work properly.

It's like comparing apples and channa.                    

[Flippant]

yeah rich said it all
mmmm apples and channa...                    

[richjob]

Heh.   Androsovic, the comparison does not really make sense.  If you want blazing speed, you'll run a really stripped-down machine, with a minimal OS.  That way, your application gets all the horsepower of the hardware.

FWIW, unless you're gaming, any CPU over 500 mhz should be Good Enough.                    

[SPK]

rich seems to have answered that question sufficiently.

What you look to ask as 'faster' depends on what you are trying to do...
If it's gaming that requires high graphic and processing power, the faster system would win...

Put it on a lower requirement powered game, the differences might be so small that you can say it's a dead heat.

I could go on, but time doesn't permit me here...but Rich seems to have summed up the concept of it mostly already