Intel Pentium III 866, 850

Conclusion

Just as we concluded in our Pentium III 1GHz and our Athlon 1GHz reviews the Pentium III holds the advantage under Win98 gaming performance while the Athlon takes the lead under professional level OpenGL performance under WinNT.

In terms of price, the advantage tilts to AMD as the Athlon (which is due for yet another price cut soon) is consistently priced lower and is more available than the Pentium III on a clock for clock basis. While the Pentium III is obviously much more available than it was back in February, it is still not nearly as abundant as the Athlon is, especially in the 700 - 800MHz clock speed range.

For overclockers, the best choice is to stick with one of the lower clock speed processors, either the Pentium III 500E/550E/600E or similarly clocked Athlons and push them to the higher clock speeds. In most cases, this is a very feasible option since the yields on these chips are high enough that the lower end CPUs can actually hit the higher end speeds without much trouble.

If you're considering one of these new Pentium IIIs, first of all, don't expect to be able to go online to your favorite vendor and find them with much ease. Secondly, Intel's next generation 0.18-micron Celerons are due out shortly, and if all goes according to plan these Celerons will be the next major overclockers since they will be based on the same 0.18-micron process as the current Coppermine Pentium IIIs. Since these Celerons will run on a 66MHz FSB by default, they will feature pretty high clock multipliers, luckily with the slowest chips most likely debuting in the 533 - 600MHz range we are expecting to be able to overclock these babies to 800 - 900MHz.

While we'll have to wait for the final word on that, considering the price point of the Celeron family of processors they are definitely worth waiting for to see if they do end up being the next big overclocker from Intel.

If you are intent on purchasing a Pentium III now, the best platform still seems to be the VIA 133A platform, especially with the actual availability of decent 133A based motherboards such as the ASUS P3V4X and the Gigabyte GA-6VX-4X.

For more information read Sharky Extreme's Pentium III 866 Review.