Quake II running the crusher.dm2 demo at 640x480x16bpp is similar to Quake III Arena in how it strains the CPU. While it isn't as pretty as Quake III Arena, it makes up with sheer quantities of gore and particles for the CPU to number crunch through. Quake II is still widely played and new games based on its aging engine are still hitting store shelves, Soldier of Fortune and Daikatana (which REALLY is coming out soon) to name but a few, making this test valid long after it was created.

In Quake II, the Pentium III 933MHz doesn't fair quite as well as its nearest rival and counterpart, the Althon 950MHz. The difference between an Athlon 950 and a Pentium III 933 we found to be 8.4fps. It does perform a bit faster than the Athlon 850MHz, but not by a significant margin. It should be noted that Quake II is optimized for AMD's 3DNow! Instruction set, a definite strength for the Athlon running Quake II engine-based games. Again, the Pentium III's full speed cache is what keeps it in the running.