Introduction

It's been a while…

Kenn: Hey, I'm going down to the South Bay today, do we need any hardware?
Me: Hmm… a couple processors would be nice. We haven't done a new CPU overclocking report yet.
Kenn: Sounds good. What do we need?
Me: How about a couple Athlon 500 processors and a few of those P3-500E chips? I hear they're pretty good overclockers.
Kenn: Okay, I'll see what I can get.
Me: Cool, and if you come back with another GeForce card I'll have to kill you…

A haggard Kenn returned four days later with an Athlon 750, a couple P3-600 FC-PGA engineering samples, and a roll of butcher paper -not quite what we expected, but at least he didn't bring back anymore GeForce cards.

A new plan

We now had three P3-600 FC-PGA engineering samples and a top of the line Athlon 750 processor. Our Trinity Micro Golden Finger Device wasn't going to see any action anytime soon.

Less than a month after AMD announced its Athlon 750, Intel announced it was releasing two new Pentium III processors, the 750 and 800. While the new P3 processors are available now, they won't be widely available until well into Q1 2000.

Being frugal hardware types, we're always wary of flagship processor prices. Sure we're willing to pay for performance, but we look for value first and foremost. For the average consumer, it's difficult to justify paying $800+ for a P3-750 when the P3-500 is available for close to $250. We're not ready to pay 3X the price for a 1.5X increase in performance especially where overclocking is always a possibility. Let's see how far we were able to overclock our P3-600 FC-PGA engineering samples and how well the fastest one performed against the Athlon 750.