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Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You?

Posted by Hemos on from the building-the-ultimate-game-machine dept.

CitizenC wrote to us with a cool review/overview of the Pentium III and the Athlon. If you've trying to decide what to get, give this a read-through.

4 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade... What's the big rush? My 8088 is doing just fine for me thank you so very much. My Jumpman scores have even been improving lately!

  2. The Athlon was right for me. by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 5
    Athlon 700: $189.
    Pentium III 700: $373.

    That's about all I have to say.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

    --
    "Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
  3. Athlon "is better?" perspective by windex · · Score: 5

    I'm using an athlon 700mhz, have been for a few months now, w/ a asus K7M motherboard. I've had absoutley zero problems with this machine under linux, and while not trying to sound like a zelot, nothing but problems under windows. With the pentinum III, I had constant problems under Linux with certian optimizations, yet windows ran perfectly. My geuss is this: It just depends on what your doing. I've got plenty of CPU to go around in the Linux world.. 1405.75 bogomips, woot. However, in Win2k, I noticed qutie offten that the processor useage meter is maxxed when I go to do a bunch of trivial things, like check e-mail, sit on irc, and play mp3's at the same time, however on my 450 pIII laptop, these tasks dont come CLOSE to using all the CPU, and considering in Linux, running X11/XMMS/Pine/Netscape, etc, all at once, my Athlon system reports as having aproximatley 97% CPU free at all times. Sooo... ultimatley, the decision is yours. Mine is this: pIII for Windows, Athlon for Linux.
    --- 'dex

  4. CPU less important today by Signal+11 · · Score: 4
    With CPU speeds getting to be what they are, I think two components are being forgotten, and how much they can impact performance.. harddrives and memory.

    PC100 or PC133? While it's really nice to have more bandwidth available, most people will never even tax a PC100 bus - it's 800MB/s! The determining factor for me is latency. The lower the latency, the less time the processor has to spend waiting. Latency is the reason why we have explicit parallelism and a half-dozen other methods to speed up the processor - predictive branching, etc. Lowering the latency has a direct benefit on system performance.

    The next one is the HDD. How long must I wait to load a program? Having lots of memory helps, but the data has to come from somewhere - that somewhere is either the network or your harddrive. Fast harddrives mean less time spent waiting for files to load. Most people don't know that loading, say, IE5, under windows can load upwards of 50 files! If your track-to-track is 0.8 instead of 0.6.. you're gonna spend a few extra /seconds/ loading those files.

    In short, the processor means nothing if you don't have the I/O up to snuff to keep it from idling.