System Setup

Test System Setup

AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1100MHz
AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1000MHz
Intel Pentium III 1133MHz
Intel Pentium III 1000MHz

ABIT KT7-RAID
ASUS P3C-E
ASUS P3V4X
VIA 4-in-1 ver 4.24

128MB PC800 RDRAM
128MB Mushkin PC133 High-Quality CAS2 SDRAM

GeForce 2 Ultra reference card
Driver version Detonator 6.18

Western Digital Caviar 20GB ATA-66 Hard Drive
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 15GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks

Winbench 99 1.1
CPUMark99
FPUMark
Business Disk Winmarks
High-End Disk Winmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2000 CPU tests - Dhrystone, Whetstone, MMX, SSE, HD, CPU/memory, FPU/memory tests

Content Creation 2000

3DMark2000

Unreal Tournament - 640x480x32
Unreal Tournament - 800x600x32
Unreal Tournament - 1024x7680x32
Unreal Tournament - 1280x1024x32

Quake 3 Retail - 510x384 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1280x960 Fastest, Normal, High Quality

MDK2 - 640x480x32
MDK2 - 800x600x32
MDK2 - 1024x768x32
MDK2 - 1280x1024x32

Notes

We've included the fastest motherboards we have for each platform. Representing Socket A is ABIT's KT7-RAID. The KT7 offered a little more performance than the Gigabyte reference motherboard that shipped with our 1.1GHz reference system so we decided to use it. We chose the P3C-E over Intel's reference Vancouver motherboard for similar reasons.

Finally, to represent the Apollo Pro133A chipset, we chose the ASUS P3V4X.

To highlight the maximum performance potential of these processors we tested with NVIDIA's 64MB GeForce 2 Ultra card outfitted with the latest Detonator drivers.

If time permits we'll include numbers from the overclocked Athlon system at 1.2GHz as well as BX133 numbers at 1.13GHz.

Editor's Note: Shortly after this review was published, the Pentium III 1.13GHz processor was recalled by Intel. Apparently, certain applications can cause the processor to become unstable. Despite this, we didn't encounter any problems during our testing for this review.