Intel Pentium III

The AMD K6-3 AnandTech reviewed back in December still packs the same punch it did then, and gives the more expensive Pentium III 500 a run for its money under Windows 9x.  There's no big performance advantage here, the K6-3 is on the heels of the Pentium III and is closely followed by the older Pentium II processors and even the priceless Pentium II Xeon.  Under Windows 9x, as a business application system, it doesn't really matter what CPU you get, as long as it performs within the middle of the above charts and is reasonably priced, you'll be perfectly fine. 

AnandTech's engineering sample of the Pentium III was not frequency locked (although all purchased chips will be) and therefore allowed AnandTech to push the limits of the CPU.  It's definitely unfortunate that Intel chose to frequency lock the Pentium III, as the Pentium III 500 made it up to 560MHz (112MHz x 5.0) without a single crash, and with a little tweaking 585MHz (117MHz x 5.0) was possible as well, albeit not as stable.  Shortly Intel will be releasing the Pentium III at clock speeds greater than 500MHz, making the 560MHz benchmarks here a hopeful indication of performance to come...