by Bubba "Masterfung" Wolford

You can see I have included two new bus speeds with the Intel 600 MHz CPU. My motherboard does not even support these bus speeds. In fact, one of the only motherboards that even supports bus speeds of 105 and 110 MHz is the newest Abit motherboard, the BE6.

The Performance Advantage

Now that we have gone through the history of the Intel CPU's, let's talk about what I saw when I stuck a new Intel 550 MHz CPU in my system, replacing my Pentium III 450. The difference, in a word, was HUGE.

When I first got my P3 550, I jerked out my P3 450 and booted up my system. My Abit BX6 Rev2 noticed a new CPU and reset my BIOS. I went into the excellent Soft Menu functions and set my CPU to run at 550 MHz by setting the multiplier to 5.5. I left the bus speed at 100 MHz, rebooted and Win98 SE began to load. It was noticeably faster than my 504 MHz P3.

The first thing I did was run Sandra 98 CPU benchmark to ensure my exact CPU speed. Sure enough it clocked out right at 552 MHz just above 550 MHz.

I then ran 3D Mark99 MAX to see what this CPU would do. Right away I was very impressed. The 3DMark99 MAX score was very impressive.

P3 550 MHz:

• 3DMark result: 5202 3DMarks
• Synthetic CPU 3D Speed: 8295

Click to continue

Those of you running the unregistered version of 3DMark 99MAX can compare your computers using mine as a baseline. Running at 800x600 is standard. Those of you running overclocked Pentium II's might feel you can match my 3D Mark score. Don't fool yourself. 3DMark 99MAX does take advantage of SIMD and 3D NOW!. These scores greatly affect the score rendered between Pentium II and Pentium III CPU's. You can find 3DMark 99MAX at Futuremark's website.

The next test I ran on the CPU was Falcon 4.0 running the PapaDoc Benchmark. You can find this benchmark at PapaDoc's website.

I noticed a huge visual increase in my frames while the benchmark was running. It is obvious that F4 is still scaling very well with a single CPU processor. All my F4 benchmarks were running with vsync turned off, all slider to the right, Player bubble set at 3, in Glide at a resolution of 800x600 and 1024x768. Let's look at the score for a vanilla Intel Pentium III 550 MHz processor.

• PapaDoc benchmark 800x600: 20.277 FPS
• PapaDoc benchmark 1024x768: 23.731 FPS

Over 20 FPS in the PapaDoc benchmark is outstanding! This is the first score ever recorded on a single processor that was over 20. Near 24 in 1024x768 (no 2D cockpit) is the highest ever recorded too! Outstanding!

Let's see what happens when we crank up the bus speed. I rebooted, entered the BIOS, set the Turbo to "On" with my bus speed of 100 MHz (really, as we have discussed, the bus speed is 103 MHz with the "turbo" enabled) and rebooted again.

OK, now we are moving. The machine posted fine and got into Windows 98 SE fine with the standard voltage set to 2.0. Once I was there, I again started Sandra 98 and check my CPU speed. I was awarded with a CPU speed of 567 MHz.

Go to Part V