Pentium III performance vs. Pentium II in March'99 Maximum PC Magazine
They reviewed three 500 MHz P3 systems (Micron, Dell, Compaq) selling
at $2,505, $2,599, $2,400 (no monitor), respectively. These all had
128M SDRAM, ~18G ATA hard drives, nVidia TNT 16M graphics.
MaxPC uses a CPU benchmark they call "BootMark" and their own suite of
Windows App benchmarks (no games) they call SYSmark 98. Here's some
comparitive numbers:
System CPU CPU Test WinApps 3DRendering Direct3D (fps)
Dell XPS R450 P2-450 209 185 492 sec 109
Compaq 5600i P2-450 205 176 498 " 96
Micron 500 Max P3-500 240 204 437 " 113
Dell XPS T500 P3-500 242 181 437 " 110
Compaq 5600i-500 P3-500 235 181 439 " 111
All five of these machines have the same video, but the P2-450's have
slower hard disks. Even with the faster hard disks, the Pentium III
500 machines are only capable of running Windows applications an
average of 4.9% faster. In fact the Dell XPS R450 runs the Windows
benchmarks slightly faster than the Dell XPS T500!
Later in the article they also give some examples for SSE-optimized
programs. The P-III-500 is then capable of improvements ranging from
45% (Dragonfly Naturally Speaking), 52% (Microsoft Netshow encoder)
to 91% (specific filters in Adobe Photoshop 5.2). However, games
like Forsaken and Turok II (unoptimized) show now significant
improvement (<10%).
Petz |
