Intel Pentium III 933

Conclusion

Both Intel and AMD have beat their product lines to death, but at least for the latter we'll be seeing a bit of a refresher with the upcoming Thunderbird/Duron releases. The Pentium III still has a few more months in it before it is dwarfed by the Willamette, in these next few months Intel will definitely have a difficult time pitting the Pentium III up against the Thunderbird unless they can bump up the clock speed to beyond 1GHz and can do so while dropping prices on the entire Pentium III line in order to remain competitive with the new Athlons.

The Pentium III 933 is actually a pretty interesting chip in that it should easily be able to make it up to 1GHz and beyond, whereas the 866 wasn't a guarantee since it was based on the old stepping of the Coppermine core (cA2). The Pentium III 933 is essentially a 1GHz part, it operates at the same core voltage, uses the same stepping of the core and should easily be able to hit that 66MHz higher clock frequency. But if you're in the overclocking mood, you'll probably want to opt for a slower Pentium III and take that up to a higher point, such as the Pentium III 600E (100MHz FSB) and push it to 800EB (133MHz FSB). The problem with overclocking something like the 933 is that you can only really successfully do so if you have FSB settings available that lie between 133MHz and 150MHz due to its fairly high clock multiplier (7.0x).

As far as platforms are concerned, we've already proven that the Intel BX chipset at 133MHz is the highest performing platform out there for use with the Pentium III, so currently there's no excuse to even bother with an Apollo Pro 133A board and there's definitely no reason to pursue an i820 board, even if it is one that supports SDRAM, especially with all of the recalls on MTH chips that have been going on recently. This takes us back to the original recommendation we made when we first reviewed the Coppermine last year, stick with the BX platform.

The Pentium IIIs are finally more available than they were a couple of months ago. As of the time of publication you can actually find Pentium III 933 chips online, although at only a few places and at a pretty hefty pricetag. The main point is that you can actually get all the Pentium IIIs (with the exception of the 1GHz parts) if you're really interested in picking one up. While that may sound like a silly thing to boast about, just a couple of months ago picking up anything faster than a 733MHz part was almost unheard of.

Then again, if you don't mind waiting, the Thunderbird is just around the corner. Provided that it gets appropriate motherboard support (which it most likely will), you can expect AMD to step forward and grab an even larger portion of the market share in the coming months before Intel can crank out their Willamette.