Speedcheck

This article provides information about the real measured speeds of the CPC's hardware using different software. The abbreviaton "n.f." means "not feasible", since some software is not capable of performing a particular task. Numbers in bold indicate the smallest needed time. All experiments have been repeated 10 times, the statistic mean of the 10 experiments is given. Time is measured in seconds.

On CPC emulators the times can vary, for this tests only real CPCs had been used. For this tests the Dobbertin HD20 hard disc had been used.

The used PC had a AMD Duron CPU running at 900 MHz. It's OS was Windows2000. Instead of Vortex format 720K DOS format has been used.

Various measurements of the floppy disc speed (3" internal or 3.5" external) or hard disc speed (Dobbertin HD20) have been taken.

Format a disc: 40 tracks (Data) or 80 tracks (Vortex or 720K Dos)

To format a disc in DS/DD/80 track Vortex format VaraDOS needed to be used instead of ParaDOS.

Copy a disc: 40 / 80 tracks, one or two drives

Copy a file of 40 KB, 176 KB or 400 KB with two drives or partitions (HD20 hard disc)

Read a file of 40 KB, 176 KB or 400 KB from floppy-disc or hard-disc (HD20)

Write a file of 40 KB, 176 KB or 400 KB to floppy-disc or hard-disc (HD20)

Read a full directory, sort it and display it on screen

In this examples X-DDOS was speeded up using the !FAST RSX command. CP/M 2.2 did not sort the directory.

Erase 64 (Data format), 128 (Vortex format) or 512 files (HD20 hard-disc) at once

FutureOS clearly beats Windows 2000.

Load and type a file of 40 KB, 176 KB or 400 KB on the screen (TYPE)

For SymbOS the fast FULLSCREEN option was used, typing a file in a window uses up significant more time and crashes more often.

Load and print a file of 40 KB on the printer

Display 64 KB in hexadecimal and ASCII chars (DUMP)

Some speed checks using ParaDOS and SymbOS remain to be performed (on a real CPC).