Desktop CPU Comparison - September 99

Uniprocessor Windows NT Performance

The K6-III seems to be much more of a competitive force under Windows NT than under Windows 98 SE, it is easier to see its strengths and potentially its weaknesses depending on the benchmark being used.  The Pentium III 600 is still quite some distance away from the Athlon 600, it would be safe to say that under NT, an Athlon 500 would be able to perform better than any other 500MHz CPU available, and offer the Pentium III 600 some serious competition at a theoretically lower price.  Whether or not AMD can actually get the 500MHz Athlon into the hands of the crowds of consumers that actually want the chip is another question entirely.

The motherboard's L3 cache on a K6-III system comes in handy especially under NT, as the K6-III 450 brings its performance level just under that of the Celeron 500 under Photoshop, although it gains some distance in the Elastic Reality benchmark.  Other than that the performance breakdown is very similar to that under Windows 98 SE.