Q My brother and I are always arguing about my Cyrix 6x86 120MHz CPU. He says it is only as fast as a Pentium 120. Is this true, because I was told it is as fast as a Pentium 150?

A When Cyrix assigns numbers to its processors, it does not use the clock speed but gives them a Pentium Rating (PR). Most modern processors are "superscalar", that is, they perform more than one instruction per clock cycle. This means that the clock speed of a processor does not give a true picture of how quickly the processor runs. Cyrix assigns each of its processors a PR number according to the clock speed of the Pentium processor that it performs closest to (but not slower than) on the Ziff-Davis Winstone Benchmark.

Misunderstandings often occur when people confuse the PR number with the clock speed. A 6x86 processor with a PR rating of 120 performs roughly equivalently to a Pentium 120. The 6x86 processor that has a 120MHz clock speed has a PR number of 150. You can easily see what clock speed your processor has by looking at the hardware setup screen displayed when your computer boots up.

Either way, the processor would be fast enough that you would not expect the Windows 95 logo screen to remain on screen for a long period of time. The logo screen appears when hardware is initialised and drivers are loaded. Some hardware components may take longer than others to initialise. Computers differ in how long they take to start up because of differing components.

The reason why Windows 95 detects the 6x86 processor as a 486 is because Windows 95 predates the 6x86 processor. There is no patch available to fix the problem, but you can expect it to be solved in Windows 98. This wonÆt affect most standard office applications. Many games use the Windows 95 processor ID and this has caused some problems, most of which have been resolved. For more information on this, visit www.cyrix.com/games/welcome.htm.