Hardware Upgrade heeft z'n K6-III vs PIII artikel van een update voorzien. Ze komen weer tot de bekende conclusie: integer performance van de K6-III is veel beter dan die PIII, maar de FPU performance van de K6-III blijft zuigen. Naast benchmarks heeft HW Upgrade een stuk over het overklokken van de K6-III:
AMD cpu, whether K6-2 or K6-III, haven’t any kind of frequency multiplier lock, so is possible to operate whether changing it, or increasing bus frequency. In general is better, with Socket 7 cpu, to increase the bus frequency, because the L2 cache works at that frequency, and everyone knows how important is the L2 cache speed for the general performance. With the K6-III the situation changes a lot, because the L2 cache is integrated in cpu Core and so the conversion into L3 cache of the motherboard cache, allows to understand how an increase of bus frequency isn’t important, if not useless, for general performance. So is necessary to obtain the highest clock frequency supported by the cpu, even if, to do this, we have to use a not very high bus frequency. Anyway is important to work at about 100 Mhz bus frequency, to obtain high performance also from L3 cache and system memory in the event of cache miss, that is data that isn’t possible to load on cpu L1 and L2 cache. For example, with a K6-2 cpu we obtain higher performance with 124x3.5 (434 Mhz) instead of 100x4.5 (450 Mhz), because the L2 cache works faster. With the K6-III, instead, is the contrary, because the L2 cache works at 450 Mhz instead of 434 Mhz.