Price: $675 - $775 esp

Ship Date: Now

After the initial release of the Pentium III 450 and 500 CPUs two months ago (has it been that long already?) Sharky Extreme's staff has been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the final .25 micron desktop Pentium III CPU, the P3-550.

We're anxious about this particular CPU for a few different reasons, but mainly because it heralds the impending arrival of a CPU that we've been following with wide eyes for the past six months, the .18 micron P3-600 Coppermine.

Due in September, along with its new host mainboard core logic AGPset (the Intel 820 Camino), the Coppermine will be the first in a long line of CPUs that Intel will manufacture at their new .18 micron process throughout 1999 and 2000.

The wait until September is not a small one however, we've got a good four months roughly until these big developments and new product introductions take place at the minimum. Until that time, Intel hopes that their 550MHz Pentium III can not only fill the gap for users craving the ultimate in performance, but that the P3-550 can continue to provide a good price/performance option to consumers as we welcome the new millenium. They also hope that this CPU will be the choice for consumers and large OEM system integrators alike, both of whom will have to decide whether to purchase this part over AMD's July-bound K7-500 CPU.

We've spent some considerable time with a production-quality level P3-550 over the past two weeks, and have performed our usual suite of real world and synthetic benchmarks on it.

How did the new top of the line Intel CPU fare? Read on…