Chris Connolly van GamePC heeft een review geschreven van de Intel Pentium III 866EB processor, die hij zowel heeft getest op een BX plank @ 133MHz FSB als een VIA Apollo Pro 133A moederbord. Hier vast een hap uit de conclusie voor je:
Basically, what it comes down to is, this processor is FAST. In fact, it's the fastest processor we've put into our testbed yet. In most applications, this chip will be faster than the Athlon 850 or 900 chip, thanks to the Coppermine's on-die full-speed L2 and the 133 MHz FSB that it runs at.
The benchmarks show that the BX platform runs the processor the quickest, but since the VIA motherboard's AGP was only running at 66 MHz, compared to 88 MHz on the BX platform, we can't very much call it a fair playing field. If you've got a video card that can handle the high bus speeds, the BX platform shows it's more than happy to run at this level without problems (we didn't experience a single crash on the BX platform throughout our testing). We were very impressed with VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset this time around, this platform really shines when using the 133 MHz FSB. VIA's boards are now looking like a fully viable option to Intel's BX platform, let's hope they can keep updating their driver sets for better and better performance.
Of course, this chip is only a another stepping stone for Intel, with the 933EB and 1000EB chips on their way soon. Once again, on-die cache is the most important reason why this chip is faster than the competition, we hate to harp on this point, but Intel will continue to reign supreme as long as AMD has off-die L2. We're still anxiously awaiting AMD's Spitfire and Thunderbird chips to have a fair processor comparison between AMD and Intel platforms. Hopefully Intel can keep up with getting processor shipments out in mass quantities to keep their customers happy, while remaining focused on the Williamette project at hand.