Intel Pentium III 533B & 600B

Under business applications the performance of the Pentium III B + 820 isn’t that bad, however it isn’t worth the added cost over the BX. As you can tell by the above chart, there is no need for the i820 platform with the Pentium III B since the Pentium III 600B is a whole 0.3% faster than the regular Pentium III 600 with the 100MHz FSB and 100MHz SDRAM. That 0.3% might as well be attributed to fluctuations in Winstone scores.

BAPCo’s SYSMark 98 benchmark suite is a good way of indicating overall system performance, and in this case, the results are very disappointing as the 133MHz FSB + the i820 platform do not even outperform the 100MHz FSB + SDRAM BX platform. The main explanation behind this is that the higher latency of the RDRAM as we mentioned in our i820 review causes most business/office/content creation applications to suffer in performance compared to the lower latency SDRAM of the BX in spite of the added memory bandwidth RDRAM offers.

The performance difference is barely noticeable at 0.4% but would you really pay the added cost for a platform that is not faster than your current BX setup? I think not.