Intel Pentium III E "Coppermine" (Slot-1)

In order to test the potential gaming performance of the CPUs we used NVIDIA’s recently released GeForce 256. Unfortunately at the time of testing, Athlon CPUs slower than 650MHz were not present in lab and thus their scores have been omitted. Rest assured that we will be conducting a direct comparison between the Pentium III E and the Athlon at all clock speeds in the near future, until then, we apologize for the inconvenience.

The GeForce seems to enjoy the full speed L2 cache of the Pentium III E in addition to the 133MHz FSB, AGP 4X support, and PC800 RDRAM of the i820 test platform. At 667MHz it steps just beyond the reach of the Athlon 700 but it is worth noting that the Athlon 700 does the same to the Pentium III 700E running on the BX platform.

The combination of the i820 platform and the full speed L2 cache of the Pentium III E definitely make a difference in the gaming performance tests with the GeForce. To satisfy our own curiosity we swapped out the GeForce with an "older" TNT2 Ultra card and found that the Athlon moved up the performance ladder slightly to be directly behind the Pentium III 733 but other than that the changes were minimal.

Both the Athlon and Pentium III E are very capable gaming processors and when armed with a next-generation card such as the GeForce, the performance differences are generally minimal.