FiringSquad heeft weer een primeur, zij hebben een exclusief verslag van de AMD Athlon 600MHz, de Pentium III killer. Het is een geweldig uitgebreid artikel, bencharks met de TNT2, Voodoo3 en Matrox G400, het zit er allemaal in. Check deze preview hier!
Once everything was installed, we prepared to run our benchmarks. The first thing I noticed was how incredibly fast and snappy the system was in Windows. Booting up was faster than with any other clean install I've performed, and the simple act of opening windows and files was instantaneous. Now, this may sound like a silly statement, but instantaneous response you get with a 550MHz+ CPU is a noticeable difference. If you think it's petty, just think about the difference a few milliseconds of response time can do to your Quake game. Instantaneous is good.Without giving anything away, the Athlon simply breezed through most of the benchmarks. In fact, it completed most tests in such a timely manner that we never had time to turn away and do something else. Regardless of actual quantitative performance, from the beginning it was very clear that AMD has a winner on their hands with the Athlon.
[...]
The Athlon's calling looks to truly be one of gaming. The most telling numbers are in the crusher scores. Crusher is a torture test for the CPU, grinding out a worst-case scenario for Quake II, with dozens of players, entities, and effects onscreen at any one time. No matter how good the 3D accelerator, breaking 50-60fps is nearly impossible on crusher, until the Athlon 600 that is. A crusher score of 70fps is unheard of, and a testament to the power of AMD's new 3-unit pipelined FPU.
