Bij Thresh's FiringSquad hebben ze gekeken wat de beste upgrade oplossing is tussen een P3-700 @ 945MHz, Celeron Celeron 600 @ 945MHz, Tbird 700 @ 950MHz en een Duron 700 @ 950MHz. De Celeron valt vanwege zijn lage performance meestal snel af waardoor de Duron @ 950MHz de meest voor de hand liggende oplossing wordt. Helaas kan die upgrade toch nog duur uitvallen vanwege de relatief dure Socket A moederborden. De Pentium 3 en de Tbird zijn erg aan elkaar gewaagd, de keuze tussen die twee hangt een beetje van je huidige situatie af (als je bv. al een goed BX plankje hebt e.d.). Hieronder wat meer info uit de conclusie:
If you're building a whole new system from scratch, you can immediately throw out the Celeron. It's too slow. As we've said before, the Celeron is only good as a BX upgrade option. If you have an aging Celeron 300A/Abit BH6 combo, you can easily swap in an FCPGA Celeron for a significant increase in performance.
The Duron looks like the system that will get you the most bang for your buck. The chip itself is incredibly inexpensive, but the motherboard will take a chunk out of the cost savings.
The Thunderbird Athlon is faster than the Duron, but it also costs twice as much. The Athlon outperforms the P3 in 3DMark, but falls behind in Quake 3 and MDK 2. Combine the cost of the Athlon with the cost of the motherboard, and you almost have enough for a Pentium 3 system.
The Pentium 3 system costs the most out of all four options. It's just as fast as the Athlon. I can't really say which chip is faster, but it does seem like applications are more likely to have Intel SSE optimizations. The Pentium 3 is also a BX upgrade option. You will, however, need to buy new PC133 memory to support the higher FSB speeds needed for overclocking.