In our opinion that will make them good performance bargains at the time, but you'll need to purchase both the CPU and the i820 mainboard at the same time if you opt for a Coppermine P3 that runs at a bus speed of 133MHz, which we'd recommend.

But what about the Athlon line from AMD? How do, or will, they compare to the Intel Coppermine P3s in performance, cost, features, etc?

It wasn't long ago that Sharky Extreme and the media in general only needed to mention Intel's CPU offerings when we talked about the high-end of the processor market.

AMD had offered competitive CPUs over the past two years to be sure, but thanks to a limited floating point unit and generally poor yield rates, they had failed to win over customers at the higher end of the market and instead were forced into heavy discounting which made them best described as Intel Celeron competitors rather than Pentium III competitors.

But on August 9th that all changed as AMD deployed what some have called their last ditch effort at assaulting the stronghold that Intel occupies in high-end desktop PCs.

Named "Athlon" in order to trigger feelings of strength and power in consumers, the new CPU line from AMD has made a huge splash in its initial 500, 550, and 600MHz versions as it routinely outperforms equivalent speed Pentium III CPUs in most benchmark tests that are run on it.