Since posting our Pentium III 1GHz review, we have been asked by many readers why we did not run the 1GHz Pentium III CPU on an SDRAM platform. The decision to run benchmarks on an RDRAM platform only was made because the OEMs we have spoken to have all stated that they will be offering the 1GHz CPU in very limited quantities and only based upon an i820 platform with RDRAM. From now until Q3, to our knowledge, there will not be any Pentium III 1GHz machines selling with SDRAM. Therefore we felt the decision to run the 1GHz benchmarks solely on an i820 platform with RDRAM was appropriate. The 866MHz tests were run with RDRAM because this will be an option available to consumers.

Quake III: Arena Performance

Quake III Arena, when run in NORMAL Quality mode at 640x480x16bpp, is a good test of both a processor's floating point and integer capabilities as well as AGP performance. By running at 640x480, we avoid encountering fill-rate limitations, at least with our Guillemot MaxiGamer Xentor TNT2 Ultra running at 175/183. We use a TNT2 Ultra instead of a GeForce because, if you test Quake III Arena with a GeForce, the GeForce's transformation and lighting engine unloads the CPU of some of its work, leaving you with a good test of the GeForce and a bad test of the CPU. We also have found problems with the GeForce's AGP 4X fast writes causing a slow-down when enabled and have thus decided to avoid or disable that feature for benchmarking purposes.

In Quake III Arena, the Pentium III 866MHz really shows off, even outperforming the Athlon 1GHz by a small but significant 3.8fps. The Athlon 850MHz falls a good deal behind as well, proving that, at higher clock speeds, the Pentium III has a significant advantage in Quake III Arena. This is ultimately due to the Pentium's full-speed on-die L2 cache, which keeps the Pentium's core well fed with data and instructions while the Athlon sits hungry, waiting for more. When AMD ships their Thunderbird with full speed on-die cache, the Pentium III will likely have a strong challenger at high clock speeds, but by then, Intel's Willamette won't be far behind. The race continues…