To: steve harris who wrote (98538 ) 3/15/2000 10:28:00 AM From: milo_morai Respond to
Sorry if re-post.. Tom's Giggy Review.www7.tomshardware.com Still my sample ran Giga-stable in any of my Giga-platforms.... "What's touchy though is the temperature specification of Giga-Coppermine. 60 degrees Celsius is the maximum heat that it is allowed to reach, which is Giga-pathetic compared to the 80 degrees C that any other Coppermine can endure. Thus Giga-PIII needs a Giga-heat sink as well unless you aren't afraid of a lot of Giga-system crashes on a regular basis. OEM's are already reporting that the Giga-heat sink requires special assembly lines, but as long as Giga-CuMine is only available in 'Giga-small quantities', those assembly lines won't be too busy I guess...."Athlon's FPU is far superior to Coppermine's, so it will smoke Giga-PIII unless the software makes heavy usage of SSE and none of 3DNow! , something that unfortunately exists..."not able to run Giga-Coppermine , because even the latest BIOS wouldn't let any CPU run faster than 800 MHz. "Giga-Availability - Athlon Yes / Pentium III No www7.tomshardware.com www7.tomshardware.com www7.tomshardware.com Athlon on KX133 is at least as fast as Coppermine on i820. I guess that's surprising too. " Here Athlon could leave the Coppermine competition behind if I wouldn't have been so bold to include Coppermine on 440BX. You can see once more that VIA's Apollo Pro 133A is not good for professional workstation software. It scores by far worst. "www7.tomshardware.com Athlon's pure FPU performance is some 33% percent higher than Coppermine's. This might not be important for the average user, but whoever is using scientific software will certainly appreciate Athlon's big performance advantage. Conclusion It must be horrible for Intel's platform division to see how badly the old 440BX-chipset destroys i820. Even if we forget about the incredibly high scores of BX for a moment, there's still the excellent results of VIA's Apollo Pro 133A platform in all 3D games and office applications. It is certainly a shame that i840 was not included in those benchmark numbers, since it could have saved Intel's face. The reason for this however is Intel itself. In its paranoia against overclocking Intel's OR840 motherboard with the i840 chipset comes equipped with a BIOS that wouldn't allow CPUs to run faster than 800 MHz. Intel could not send me a fix until now and the answer was "Giga Hertz systems are supposed to ship on i820 platforms. So far there is no plan to use Pentium III 1000 on the OR840 motherboard." Isn't that a typical Intel-answer? The fastest processor build by Intel is not supposed to run on the fastest platform that's officially available! Somebody understand Intel's logic! It's not only nice to see that Giga-Athlon performs best in the majority of the SPECviewperf and FPU benchmarks. In the rest of the tests Giga-Athlon is certainly not exactly far behind Giga-Pentium III as well. Keep this in mind when you realize that Intel can hardly ship any gigahertz Pentium III processors. While Intel has not even got enough processors in the area between 800 and 1000 MHz to release Pentium III 866 and 933, and Europe is bar of any 1 GHz PIII sample altogether, AMD is equipping the press as well as its OEMs with gigahertz Athlons. If you really think that you need a Giga-System, the decision will be very easy. Athlon Gigas are actually available, Pentium III Gigas are a simple phantom. You cannot buy what isn't there, can you? Let's see if Intel has successfully impacted AMD's business by releasing the Pentium III at 1 GHz prematurely. Intel's plan might have been to damage AMD's sales by releasing a phantom product at a very low price. If this phantom product doesn't soon become reality however, Intel's plan might backfire. I wonder if Craig Barret (or was it Kyle after all?) will succeed with this boasting policy. "
