Product: Pentium III 1Ghz B & Intel VC820 Motherboard
Company: Intel corp.
Website: http://www.intel.com
Estimated Street Price for the CPU: $990.00 in 1000 unit quantities
Review By: Julien JAY

Benchmarks

We tested the Pentium III 1Ghz B chip on an Intel VC820 motherboard we'll review later here with the latest bios available from Intel. Running with 256Mb of 800Mhz ECC Rambus and with a Creative GeForce 2 GTS II 32Mo graphic board. The hard disks were: Maxtor 30Gb UDMA 66; IBM 20Gb UDMA 66 and Maxtor 8.4Gb UDMA 66. You can read the complete PC Setup below. Sure this benchmarks will show the PIII 1Ghz is more powerful than previous ones like the 800 & 600 ones but they will highlight for example that concerning business applications the gain in performance is negligible.

	This benchmark was made with Norton Utilities 2000. The first result is the basic performance: 449.9 and the second one is the consolidated performance: 461.5. So the Pentium III 1GhzB is 461.5 times more faster than a i386 16Mhz CPU!!! Unbelievable!
	This 3D benchmark was made with ZD 3D WinBench 2000. With a Pentium III 600B we obtain a 3D Processor test result of 1.09 units. On the same computer but with a Pentium III 800B the 3D Processor test result reaches 1.29 units. And finally with a Pentium III 1Ghz the results climb up to 1.77 Units!
	We ran the business tests of the ZD Winstone 99 benchmark tool on the same computer with three different CPUs: one running at 600Mhz one other running at 800 Mhz and the last one running at 1Ghz. As you can see there’s a few difference (only 2.4 units) between the PIII800B and the PIII1Ghz B that is obviously more powerful.
	Here are, for information, the Intel iComp index for the Pentium III 600B and the Pentium III 800B. As you can see the Pentium III 800B is 1.27 times more powerful then the 600 B.
	Here are the results of the ZD Content Creation 2000 tests which runs a lot of content creation software such as Photoshop 5, SoundForge, Director 7, Premiere 5.1, Communicator, DreamWeaver 2. As you can see the Pentium III 1Ghz B is really much powerful for this kind of use than the Pentium III 600B.
	As you can see in this chart the Pentium III 1Ghz B really boosts the 3d performance of our GeForce II board. It reaches nearly 92 frames per seconds instead of 83 fps for a PIII 800B, Wahoooooooo!
	The online WinTune tests also prove that the Pentium III 1Ghz B is much faster than the 800B one, which is obviously normal.
	Finally we tested the Intel Pentium III 1Ghz B core performances using the Ziff Davis CPU Mark tool and we obtained this results that are the highest we've ever seen concerning the PIII 1Ghz. As you can see the score of the 800 is 71.2 and the PIII 1Ghz one is about 82.3!!!
	As you can read from the following benchmark using ZD High End Winstone 99 test protocol the Pentium III 1Ghz is much more powerful than its direct competitor the AMD Athlon 1Ghz CPU. It's the same thing for 3d benchmarks: the Pentium III 733Mhz performance are 12% better than the one of an Athlon 750 (using the NewTek LightWave 5.6 software to render textured 3d scenes) which is a bit disappointing since the Athlon CPU we tested is faster than the PIII. This test puts in evidence the limits of the Athlon CPU architecture that contains a slow 512Kb cache memory running at only 333Mhz. AMD is forced to not include a full speed cache memory because to reach the 1Ghz barrier they simply augment the core voltage of the CPU from 1.6V to 1.8V so it heats too much.
	For those of you who don't believe us when we wrote the Rambus memory is really interesting and more powerful than SDRAM here are the results of the benchmark we ran using the Ziff Davis CPU mark utility on two i820 enabled Pentium III 800EB PCs one using SDRAM PC 100 & the other using Rambus 800 memory. The results speak for themselves.

Please note that these benchmarks were run on a computer without any running TSRs & without the hardware drivers (except the one of the GeForce 2 board).

Test Configurations

First configuration: Complete PC setup for PIII 1Ghz B tests Motherboard: Intel VC820 with latest bios P11 and i820 chipset, CPU: Pentium III 600B, Pentium III 800B & Pentium III 1Ghz B, Memory: 256Mb of RDRAM (Rambus) running at 800Mhz with ECC correction, Hard Disks: Maxtor 30Gb UDMA 66 7200rpm ; IBM 20Gb UDMA 66 7200rpm ; Maxtor 8.4Gb UDMA 66 5400 rpm, DVD: Pioneer DVD104 EIDE UDMA 3 10/40x, Display adapter: Creative GeForce 2GTS II 32Mb with latest 4.03 drivers, Sound card: Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, Peripherals: Creative DXR3 card, Pinnacle Studio DV, miroVideo DC30+, Adaptec AHA2940AU, Yamaha 4416S CD Burner, MS Intellimouse Explorer, MS Natural Keyboard Pro, Iomega ZIP 250 SCSI & Iomega JAZ II Go SCSI, Agfa Snapscan 1236s, Bewan USBooster 128 modem & 3com Professional Message Modem. Everything was running under Windows 98SE.

Inside one of our test PC...

Second configuration used for the III 600B & PIII 800B tests (except for the 3d WinMark 2k & WinTune ones that were done on the first PC just by changing the chip.): Motherboard: Asus P3C2000 with latest 1020 beta 9 bios and i820 chipset, CPU: Pentium III 600B & Pentium III 800B, Memory: 256Mb of SDRAM running at 100Mhz, Hard Disks: Maxtor 30Gb UDMA 66 7200rpm ; IBM 20Gb UDMA 66 7200rpm ; Maxtor 8.4Gb UDMA 66 5400 rpm, DVD: Pioneer DVD104 EIDE UDMA 3 10/40x, Display adapter: Matrox Millennium G400 Max with the latest 5.52 drivers, Sound card: Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, Peripherals: Creative DXR3 card, Pinnacle Studio DV, miroVideo DC30+, Adaptec AHA2940AU, Yamaha 4416S CD Burner, MS IntelliMouse Explorer, MS Natural Keyboard Pro,… Everything was running under Windows 98SE.