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Last revised:
10/11/1999

Intel Pentium III/600B vs. Pentium III/600 Performance
Intel Pentium III/600B vs. Pentium III/600

Intel Pentium III With the recent introduction of the AMD Athlon processor, the Pentium III is no longer the fastest desktop processor in town. The Pentium III's 100MHz front side bus (FSB) was first introduced in the Pentium II/350 CPU. Even as the CPU speed have scaled up to a blistering 600MHz, the FSB still remains constant at 100MHz.

It is against this backdrop that Intel will finally increase the FSB from 100MHz to 133MHz. In order for a 440BX based system to be stable at 133Mhz, there are few things to consider:

  • Processor - Intel will release variants of its Pentium III CPU. For example, the Pentium III/600 and Pentium III/600B. The "B" designation means the CPU is capable of 133MHz FSB. In addition, Intel's next generation Pentium III processor, codename Coppermine, will also be capable of 133MHz FSB.

  • Memory - Likewise, the SDRAM memory must be rated for PC133, instead of PC100.

  • Motherboard - The motherboard must also support a 133MHz FSB setting, either via jumper settings or in the BIOS setup.

    Here's the quick rundown of the components used in testing:

    Motherboard PREMIO BX (212E)
    Chipset Intel 440BX AGPset
    BIOS Award version 2.3B4 - 09/29/1999
    Processors Intel Pentium III/600 and Pentium III/600B
    Memory 128MB (two pieces of KTI 64MB PC133 DIMM)
    Hard Drive Quantum Fireball 8.4GB ATA-66
    DVD-ROM Samsung SD-604 6X ATAPI
    Video Card ATI Xpert 128 16MB AGP 2X
    Operating Systems Microsoft Windows 98SE and NT 4.0 Workstation SP5

    For the BIOS setting, the Pentium III/600B was set to 4.5 x 133MHz FSB = 600MHz; while the Pentium III/600 was set to 6.0 x 100MHz FSB = 600MHz.

    Ziff-Davis Winstone 99 measures overall system performance by running through a series of commonly used business and engineering applications. Higher number means better performance.

    Winstone 99/NT and 98SE

    From the above chart, we see that the 133MHz FSB Pentium III/600B manages to edge out the Pentium III/600 by a small degree in both Windows NT 4.0 (Highend) and 98SE (Business); the test resolution was set at 1024x768.

    In conclusion, there is a slight performance gain when increasing the FSB from 100MHz to 133MHz. But the overall gain is significantly lower the expected 33%. This is because other parts of the system are contributing to overall system bottleneck. My recommendation is, unless you have an urgent need for a slight performance increase, wait for the Intel 820 chipset and the next generation Pentium III processor (a.k.a. Coppermine), which will give you AGP 4X, ATA-66, and 256K on-die CPU L2 cache.

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