The Tualatin should easily win.

Already was seeing a GPU limitation with the Radeon 9200, so swapping in a GF4 Ti4600.

First teaser.

Roughly 1.1Ghz, but heavily OC'd FSB on the Thunderbird.

Stock FSB

Overclocked FSB

Stock Tualatin

Something seems off with your Tualatin score (maybe it’s the chipset?)
Anyway, I will do some tests on one of my P3 1.4Ghz platforms and see how they compare.

Still, great score for the Thunderbird. I had a 1333 Mhz Thunderbird in 2001 and it served me well. Before that, I had a super socket 7 platform with a K6-2 500 MHz and I think it was BY FAR the greatest jump in performance that I ever had with an upgrade.

No, your score was valid. Just tested my Tualatin 1.4 GHz, OC @ 1.575 GHz on Asus TUSL2-C with 3DMark 2001 SE, and I scored 8825 points (with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200).
So the Athlon's score is indeed impressive (although this kind of performance difference is probably limited to only a few scenarios).
It would be good if you could compare them in other games. Just did a few benchmarks myself (again, Tualatin @ FSB 150, 1.575 GHz, with GeForce 4 Ti 4200):

GLQuake timedemo 1024 x 768: 415 FPS
Quake 2 timedemo 1027 x 768: 376 FPS
Expendable timedemo 1027 x 768: 124 FPS

So the Athlon's score is indeed impressive

Not really. Both Pentium 3 and Athlon were starved with very limited memory bandwidth in SDRAM era.

Nforce 2 is making all the difference in there

I think realistically it makes more sense to compare the 1GHz Thunderbird with Coppermine P3,
and Tualatin with Athlon XP Palomino

interesting result regardless

Given on the Tualatin you are running CPUZ 1.76.0.x32 rather than 1.01.0.w9x I suspect it's WXP rather than W98 which I suspect this will be a factor.

You really need to use the same OS on the two systems and have the same screen resolution

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-04-19, 09:11:

So the Athlon's score is indeed impressive

Not really. Both Pentium 3 and Athlon were starved with very limited memory bandwidth in SDRAM era.

You're right. I missed the nForce 2 chipset. In this case it makes perfect sense! Still, impressive!

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-04-19, 09:11:

So the Athlon's score is indeed impressive

Not really. Both Pentium 3 and Athlon were starved with very limited memory bandwidth in SDRAM era.

Both DDR and Rambus boards did exist for the Pentium 3, but they were unicorns and super expensive. Rambus boards with the i820 and i840 are even more expensive and harder to find.

Super Micro had the P3TDDR with two sockets, the only downside is it only had PCI slots. I have a P3TDDE, which uses the same VIA Apollo 266T chipset, but has more PCI slots and an AGP Pro 4x slot. It was a great gaming rig back in the day, I still boot it up every now and then for a trip down nostalgia lane.

I'm not really sure how effective the increased bandwidth is though with the FSB being constrained as it was, especially with dual socket systems.

Both systems are running Win98 SE.

I was able to push the Tualatin score a bit higher at FSB 137, but that is where the ram tops out I think.

I paid entirely too much for a KT133A motherboard on Ebay, so I will swap the Athlon into it when it arrives and retest.

The A7N8X I am using is an older revision that only officially supports 166/333 FSB. I might move the Thunderbird over to a real Nforce 2 Ultra 400 and see if the FSB can get to 200. For science.

This is about the highest I can get the FSB on the Tuly. I think the RAM is the limiter.

If you can find some PC150 SDRAM, you might try that if your current memory won't go past 137 MHz. You could also try using a 2:3 divider (if available) to drop it down.

PC150 memory wasn't around that long before DDR supplanted it and it disappeared.

Falco wrote on 2020-04-19, 14:06:

If you can find some PC150 SDRAM, you might try that if your current memory won't go past 137 MHz. You could also try using a 2:3 divider (if available) to drop it down.

PC150 memory wasn't around that long before DDR supplanted it and it disappeared.

Although you can find nice sticks that aren't classified as PC150 but they can do 150, even at the tightest timings. I've just gone through a HDD box worth of SD sticks and found some of these kinds that could do 150/fastest in whatever board I tried them in.

16-chip 256MiB "BX friendly" sticks that could do at least one pass of GoldMemory (it was convenient, most of these had been 1-pass memtest86 tested in "the other" board at 143MHz/cl2/turbo) in a P3B-F, 150MHz/2-2-2-5:

Mosel V54C3128804VBI7PC
Mosel V54C3128804VAT7
Hynix HY57V28820HCT-K (and I had to throw away every -H as they weren't up to the requirements)
Micron 48LC16M8A2 TG 7E-E
VDATA VDS7608A4A-75G (I don't know who the original manufacturer might be)
Infineon HYB39S128800CT-7
Infineon HYB39S128800CT-75 (funny enough I had more success with these than with the -7 parts that should be faster on paper)

16-chip 512MiB modules, one pass memtest86 in an MSI 694T, 150/cl2/turbo:

Quimonda HYB39S256800FE-7 (I have a bunch of CSX sticks with re-marked chips, the ones on this one were left alone for some reason)
Infineon HYB39S256800T-7.5
Mosel V54C3256804VDI7PC
Nanya NT5SV32M8BS-75B
Samsung K4S560832C-TC7C

Of course it doesn't mean that all of the chips with these specs can do 150/cl2 in any circumstances.

Both DDR and Rambus boards did exist for the Pentium 3, but they were unicorns and super expensive.

1. No. DDR Pentium 3 boards weren't super expensive. And DDR itself was noticeably cheaper than RDRAM.
2. Both DDR and RDRAM are useless for PIII, because lazy Intel never changed FSB substantially from classic Pentium era. PIII can't benefit from DDR.

That's true, I remember from Anandtech reviews back in the day. P3 with DDR was maybe 2 - 3% faster in certain workloads.

buff wrote on 2020-04-19, 14:01:

This is about the highest I can get the FSB on the Tuly. I think the RAM is the limiter.

Strange... Is it PC100 or PC133? Basically all (or most?) of my PC133 modules can do 150MHz just fine (I never had to switch one because the other wasn't working).

Later edit: never mind, I saw that you wrote in your first post that the RAM is PC133. Another possibility would be the VIA chipset (I never used Intel CPUs with VIA, so I'm not sure how good these chipsets are for overclocking).

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-04-19, 16:48:

Both DDR and Rambus boards did exist for the Pentium 3, but they were unicorns and super expensive.

1. No. DDR Pentium 3 boards weren't super expensive. And DDR itself was noticeably cheaper than RDRAM.
2. Both DDR and RDRAM are useless for PIII, because lazy Intel never changed FSB substantially from classic Pentium era. PIII can't benefit from DDR.

I've run my PIII-S on 694T, i815 (both SDRAM), and Apollo Pro 266T (DDR). The DDR board is quite a bit faster than the SDRAM equipped boards. Of course, that may be because of the chipset/memory controller itself and not the memory type. There are some 266T boards out there that support both SDR and DDR. It would be interesting to run some comparison tests.

My PIII-S @ 1575MHz with 2-2-2-5 DDR and a 6800GT can hit 13.6K in 3DMark01. I remember another user with a SiS 635T (also DDR) hitting roughly the same score. That's around 1000 points higher than the SDR-equipped boards.

Here's global testing of chipsets on Vogons. 440BX and SIS DDR are the fastest chipsets for P6 CPU.