Intel Pentium III 866, 850

AnandTech CPU Rating

Performance

Under content creation and gaming applications the Pentium III performs quite well, even outperforming the Athlon in some cases. Unfortunately the CPU loses points here because it doesn't perform nearly as well as the Athlon in the NT - OpenGL tests.

Features

Features aren't a problem here. The full speed on-die L2 cache helps performance quite a bit, and in cases where SSE is taken advantage of the Pentium III definitely excels.

One feature that is heavily in favor of the Pentium III is SMP motherboard and chipset support. While there will be a SMP Athlon chipset due out later this year/early next year, SMP support is something that professionals demand now, and the Pentium III delivers it.

Price

The price to performance ratio of the Pentium III is less than that of the Athlon simply based on the recent price conditions where the Athlon is, clock for clock, noticeably cheaper than the Pentium III.

Unless AMD or Intel experience a major change, don't expect things to turn around anytime soon.

Availability

These new chips will be much more available than the 1GHz Pentium IIIs but the Pentium III in general is still not as widely available as the Athlon.