Hot Hardware's Test System Built for speed

Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS,  Pentium !!!  933EB,  Abit CX6 Motherboard (review soon), 128MB of  800MHz (400MHz. DDR) Techworks  RDRAM, WD Expert AC418000 7200 RPM ATA66 Hard Drive, Elsa Gladiac, Alpha PEP66 Provided by Plycon, Kenwood 72X CDROM,
Win 98SE, NVidia 5.22 Drivers, DirectX 7.0a

Business Benchmarks and Gaming With The Pentium III 933 Turn on the screen saver, the boss is coming!

Whether crunching numbers in a spreadsheet or laying out a newsletter or web page, the ability to do things faster is always a welcome relief for the Businessman or Woman.  Let's take a look at what the Pentium III will afford us here.

Ziff Davis Winbench 99 Version 1.1

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You can compare CPUMark scores in this test, to our review, from not long ago, of the P3-800.  As processor speeds scale higher, the i820 platform with RAMBUS as system memory, does begin to shine quite nicely.  As we all know however, pricing needs to get much more in line for it to become practical for the average end user.  We are waiting for an i815 board from Intel or a specific motherboard manufacturer who's name begins with the letter "A".  (that narrows it down to 2 and they know who they are)  We are eager to see for ourselves, what kind of performance the i815 and good PC133 memory can bring.  Time will tell but with some of the early first peeks that are available on the net, the i815 may just be the ticket for the mainstream user.

As the saying goes, "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy".  Let's Quake, shall we?

Once again, Intel has tossed the graphics processing "bottle-neck" back over the wall to the 3D Graphics card manufacturers.  As you can see in these charts, the scores level off identically at high resolutions in 32 bit color.  This is because our host Pentium III processor is serving up all the polygons that the GeForce 2 driven Elsa Gladiac can take but the GeForce 2 chip has hit its fill rate limitation.  Bear in mind that significant performance increases can be realized by overclocking the core speed of the GeForce 2 chip on the Gladiac.  This is a feature that is supported (although perhaps unofficially) by most 3D card manufacturers and it really yields results.  With the Gladiac turned up to 225MHz.Core and 340MHz. DDR Memory speeds, we were hitting 86 FPS at 1024X768 with the 933MHz. Pentium III driving the bandwidth with its ample power.

For most of the HotHardware audience (obviously classified as high performance power users), every new release of a faster processor brings a sparkle to the eye and hope of a new level of performance.  In this regard the Intel Pentium III 933 delivers on every level.  On the downside, a P3-933 will set you back about $775.  For most, the cost will be prohibitive at this point in time.  However, as we all know, the cost curve for processors is steep and it won't be long before the P3-933 is affordable in the mainstream.  Moreover, for those who just have to own the fastest and most powerful computing platform, the cost won't cause even a flinch when you consider the horsepower under the hood.

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