No, no way in hell. A K6-III+ 550 is roughly as fast as a Pentium II 350 (sometimes faster, sometimes slower). A Pentium III Katmai 550 will annihilate the poor K6, so imagine what an Athlon/Duron can do which are even faster than the Katmais.

F2bnp wrote:

No, no way in hell. A K6-III+ 550 is roughly as fast as a Pentium II 350 (sometimes faster, sometimes slower). A Pentium III Katmai 550 will annihilate the poor K6, so imagine what an Athlon/Duron can do which are even faster than the Katmais.

If we are talking about gaming that is, in some tasks the K6-3+ is faster clock for clock compared to the (early) Athlon, Duron, Deschutes and Katmai but I guess we are mostly interested in gaming. 😀

I haven't done many tests but certainly the K6-3 surpass everywhere the K6-2 even when when the first has 100Mhz less than the second. So I would expect the old gap was actually filled between the K6-2 and the Pentium II. Is the Pentium II so fast that can be faster with 200 Mhz less and slower cache freq?

When it comes to FPU performance, do not overestimate the K6-3+. In integer-heavy operations the Pentium 2 probably takes a serious beating.

I probably always understimated the PII not having ever tested it myself. I always had too much patience for the K6 cpu family even if I do remember (and nowdays testing) its limits. 😁

Skyscraper wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

No, no way in hell. A K6-III+ 550 is roughly as fast as a Pentium II 350 (sometimes faster, sometimes slower). A Pentium III Katmai 550 will annihilate the poor K6, so imagine what an Athlon/Duron can do which are even faster than the Katmais.

If we are talking about gaming that is, in some tasks the K6-3+ is faster clock for clock compared to the (early) Athlon, Duron, Deschutes and Katmai but I guess we are mostly interested in gaming. 😀

I've heard this many times, but I haven't really seen it reflected on benchmarks. If you have any, I'd like to see them!

F2bnp wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

No, no way in hell. A K6-III+ 550 is roughly as fast as a Pentium II 350 (sometimes faster, sometimes slower). A Pentium III Katmai 550 will annihilate the poor K6, so imagine what an Athlon/Duron can do which are even faster than the Katmais.

If we are talking about gaming that is, in some tasks the K6-3+ is faster clock for clock compared to the (early) Athlon, Duron, Deschutes and Katmai but I guess we are mostly interested in gaming. 😀

I've heard this many times, but I haven't really seen it reflected on benchmarks. If you have any, I'd like to see them!

I can't find any benchmarks that proves that as well. In tomshardware big cpu marathon a k6-3 450 and k6-2+ 500 get a real good beating from a duron 550, even if you reduce the scores by 20% to somewhat match the clockspeed the k6-3 still wouldn't come close in ANY of those benchmark tests.

I love my k6-3+ but the athlon/duron was a BIG jump.

Supposedly real life office stuff like spreadsheets and the like where the combination of fast cache and very short pipeline really shines. That said I have not seen any benchmarks either.

I performed quite extensive benchmarks of K6-III and it is slower than PIII or K7 in all applications I tried, including non-gaming stuff.
CPU benchmark - part I. (1995 - 1999)

havli wrote:

I performed quite extensive benchmarks of K6-III and it is slower than PIII or K7 in all applications I tried, including non-gaming stuff.
CPU benchmark - part I. (1995 - 1999)

Did you test CPUmark 99?

That is at least a benchmark where the K6-3+ eats the Deschutes and Katmai for breakfast as fast cache is crucial, It gets beaten by the Coppermine though but only with a small margin. Im not sure if the Durons 64KB+128KB cache is enough to beat the K6-3+ with 32KB +32KB +256KB but it probably is.

Yeah, forgot this benchmark. One victory then. 😀

from my experience, going from a K6-III 450Mhz to a Katmai 450Mhz , paired with a Voodoo3 card, yielded close to twice the frame rate in most 3D games. It was rather sad to watch the K6 struggle with games like Sin and Quake3 , while the Katmai did much better.

general OS tasks didnt seem much faster but that was on Win98, so there is only so much that can be done there.

I suspect the early Athlons will do even better.

My take:

In my SLI scaling project I found the K6-III+ to be very similar to the Deschutes 400 / Katmai 500 when it comes to playing at higher resolutions, but at V2 SLI 512 x 384 you can see that Intel pulls ahead.

Apart from Unreal, both processors achieve 60+ FPS at 1024 x 768 with the V2, so when it comes to gaming there is not much real difference, but the Intel is faster when you lower the resolution.

With faster graphics cars, the Intel should show a lead at higher resolutions.

So yea, the Intel is faster, but it depends on what graphics card you're using. You will also notice it in other aspect such as loading times and so on.

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/uploads/3/7/2 … ing_project.pdf

What would be really interesting is data for minimum frame rates. 😁

F2bnp wrote:

No, no way in hell. A K6-III+ 550 is roughly as fast as a Pentium II 350 (sometimes faster, sometimes slower). A Pentium III Katmai 550 will annihilate the poor K6, so imagine what an Athlon/Duron can do which are even faster than the Katmais.

According to a compilation review by Tom's Hardware, the standard K6-III/500 "walked all over the Pentium II/450". With the die shrink allowing the K6-III+ to reach 550 and 600+ with overclocking, I would think the K6-III+ proves a decent counter to the Katmai core P-III's @ 500/600MHz... that is until you get to floating point performance. It'll lag a bit there.

QBiN wrote:

According to a compilation review by Tom's Hardware, the standard K6-III/500 "walked all over the Pentium II/450". With the die shrink allowing the K6-III+ to reach 550 and 600+ with overclocking, I would think the K6-III+ proves a decent counter to the Katmai core P-III's @ 500/600MHz... that is until you get to floating point performance. It'll lag a bit there.

Memory performance is another issue with K6. Look at the abysmal numbers on those tests. K6-III+ scaling at 600 is going to be limited by that. It helps if you can run the FSB at 133.

As indicated in the Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison, the AMD K6-3-500 scored 22.1 in Quake2 (software mode 640x480). The Athlon-500 scored 35.1. Similarly, the K6-3-600 scored 25.4, while the Athlon-600 scored 39.9. That is a 57% improvement.

Conversely, the AMD K6-3 was about 13% faster in Quake 1 (software mode 640x480) compared to the Athlon at the same clock speed. Why the about face? Is this because I did not run FastVid during the benchmarks?

Back in 2000 I upgraded from a Epox Super 7 with K6-2 500 and TNT2 Pro to a Duron 650 and the same video card.

I well remember underclocking the Duron to 500mhz and comparing benchmarks in 3dmark2000. The Duron got double the score
with the same video card. The reason I upgraded so shortly (6 months or so) after getting the Super 7 board and k6-2 500 was that the performance
in games sucked compared to what I had expected.
A k6-2 system should really be looked at as a Pentium on steroids.

Imperious wrote:

A k6-2 system should really be looked at as a Pentium on steroids.

That's about it. The K6-IIIs on-die cache helps, but it can only do so much on a platform that should've died years earlier.