Price: $650 - $700 esp

Ship Date: Now

With the summer of 1999 now half over, the PC industry finds itself continuing to burn with the heat of a 110 degree day in Las Vegas.

New product introductions have come fast and furious lately as most hardware manufacturers are launching products that are intended to make up the core of their business for the remainder of the year.

Intel, who is definitely no stranger to massive product launches, is now shipping their fastest desktop CPU yet, the Pentium III 600.

Utilizing a .25 micron manufacturing process and the standard 100MHz front side bus speed, the new P3-600 is being offered at the lowest launch price an Intel desktop flagship CPU has been offered in the past 15 years.

Low prices, high speed, availability, what's not to like? Read on as Sharky Extreme puts Intel's newest top gun through its paces.

Along with the P3-450, 500, and 550, the new 600MHz variant incorporates the same technology that the previous models have, albeit at a faster internal core speed.

SSE is present and accounted for in the P3-600, as it is in the rest of the P3 line, as well as 32KB of L1 cache combined with 512KB of L2 cache.

Also, like the rest of the P3 line, the new 600MHz CPU is packaged exclusively in Intel's SECC2 format, which offers full Slot-1 compatibility. Eventually Intel will move their P3 CPU line to a new version of their current Celeron Socket370 architecture, for now though Slot-1 is their preferred format.