Not bad eh? KryoTech's Cool K6-3 500 rig crushes their own Cool K6-2 500's scores for $400 less cash and more features.

Now that's more like it.

In fact, the Cool K6-3 500 puts a hurt down on the $750 Intel Pentium III-500 CPU in almost half of the benchmarks we utilized. This is due to a couple reasons, first you have the AMD K6-3's full core speed L2 cache, in this case running at 500MHz. This alone is enough of a performance boost to jack the benchmarks up quite a bit. Second, you have the fact that more and more game developers are supporting the 3DNow! SIMD geometry instructions. AMD just recently released a list of over 50 top tier games that will offer 3DNow! support for 1999, and almost every game that's going to be worth a damn was on the list.

Even though we included full benchmarks in this article with games that don't support 3DNow! at this time, we expect this to become a moot point towards the middle of the year.

The P3-500 isn't crying much about being beaten in a few of the scores though, as our preliminary results with two SSE-instruction optimized game engines have yielded a 20 - 25% performance gain in their general frame rate scores. If this trend holds, then the Pentium III will once again be the clearly dominant high-end CPU it's intended to be.

Once we get a completed game engine, and not ones that are "40% complete" according to their developers, we'll do a full article on the P3's SSE capabilities.