Intel Pentium III 1.13 GHz processor > Reviews > Power at a price

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Manufacturer Support	Satisfactory
Instruction manual	Satisfactory
Value For Money	Poor

Advantages:	Fast Chip, newest instruction set
Disadvantages:	Far too priceycompared to AMD

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

The Intel PIII is one of the two most powerfull processors on the market along with the AMD Athlon. The real problem I have with the Intel offereing is there price. I dont believe that the PIII is better than the Athlon, I believe its close but no where near as the price difference suggests.

The Pentium III was the first Intel chip to have SSE(Streaming SIMD* Extensions)

* Single Edge Contact Cartridge

Basically this was MMX 2, it does all the jobs that MMX was supposed to do and never really made a great job of. SSE contains 70 new instructions for the processor. The PIII has been marketed to be able to speed up your internet experience. Well I have to question this claim. Allthough it can process fast, "Your computer is only as fast as its weakest component". And as far As I am concerned there is not a modem out there that can pass data quicker than a PIII. The only thing that could be said about it is that playing online games with DirectX could be slightly faster due to Microsoft having support for SSE built in from 6.1 onwards.

The spped of the PIII is no more than you would expect, but they do make it tricky in trying to find out exactly hat you are getting, for example We've got the standard, the B (133MHz bus), the E (256K L2 on die), and the EB (both 133MHz bus and 256K L2 on die). What's that all about then? They do like making life difficult.

The specs of the coppermine are respectable at the top level with most having 256k cache and 100/133Mhz FSB and the standard 0.18 Micron technology.

Fast Chip, the motherboards are cheaper than the ones for the Athlon and you dont need a special case with a 300W power supply. But the prices of the PIII are well overpriced and I dont think its worth that extra money, I have to say go with the Thunderbird in this situation.