VIA Cyrix III 500 MHz processor

Advantages: Cheap, respectable looking clockspeeds
Disadvantages: Blown away by the old Joshua design, nearly equalled by the MII at half the clock speed, bad benchmarks, bad press

...The VIACyrix III has proved to be a bit of a dissapointment although it wasnt always this way. Id readied myself since Christmas to get one of these. Up until recently the CyrixIII was based on the Joshua core from Cyrix. This was reasonably quick for the area that it was aimed at. It had a stonking great 64k L1 and 256k L2 cache with 3DNow! and was to be released at PR ratings of between 433 and 566 and be expected to ratchet up to around PR700-800 depending on how far the core could be pushed. However not long before relesase VIA chose to use the Winchip 4 core from Centaur and to be frank this core doesnt have a patch on Joshua, in fact its crap. The benchmarks have come out and based on the benchmarks I saw, comparing the NewCyrixIII-533 and the NewCyrixIII-666 and the Cyrix MII-333 and the JoshuaCyrixIII-PR433 the new Centaur core... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: its cheap
Disadvantages: its not a power chip

...VIA Technologies Cyrix III This processor is designed for entry level pcs but has much more to offer than Intel’s Celerons but fails short of AMD Durons but it does offer more performance than people think with both MMX and 3Dnow as well as being the first processor to offer 0.13 micron beating the others to this crown and the fastest model is 833 but the prices are very cheap and for those who want a basic machine for internet then you wont go wrong but it does not offer the power needed for top notch games but for those who are on a budget get this and as it uses 370 processor slots it is also cheap to get motherboards to go with it and so a cheap pc can be built or even brought.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: cheap, cheap motherboards available
Disadvantages: pretty slow, can get better performance if you dont pay too much more

...The Cyrix III from what I can gather was going to be based on a rather promising looking design from Cyrix, however VIA stepped in and seemingly ruined this by putting the design from the Centaur or Winchip team in. This has had disasterous consequences with the CPU becoming a laughing stock because of its very poor benchmarks. Its the one CPU that makes my Cyrix MII look speedy!!!!! I am trying to find a reason to reccommend this CPU to you and thinking about it I can only think of 1 and that is price. However I then think that you can get a 600 Duron for only slightly more and this is supposed to be a lot quicker than a Celeron and yet the Celeron leaves the Cyrix III trailing in its dust. However the one thing the Cyrix III has in its favour over the Duron is that you can pick up cheapish socket 370 motherboards particularly ones... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful