First post, by rcarkk
"The Katmai contender"
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Released in late February 1999 with general availability in late March 1999, the Super socket 7 AMD K6-III CPU was the last iteration of the NexGen Nx686 architecture implemented by AMD after the aquisition of the company.
Sporting full speed OnDie 256Kb L2 cache, this CPU had a faster Integer unit than the P6 Katmai. The FPU wasn´t bad either, but no match for the IPC of the Katmai. Basically the 4th iteration of the architecture, it supports enhanced 3DNow! and MMX instructions.
This K6-III 400 running at 450MHz (4.5 x 100MHz), operates on the good/fast ALi V chipset equiped with 512Kb of 100MHz SRAM. This efectively gives the CPU 3 levels of cache, called by AMD, Tri-Level. 128MB of PC100 @CL2-2-2-6 are installed.
After lots of tweaking the AGP is perfectly stable with the TNT2 Ultra. The choice of the card was purely contemporary and the possibility to have stellar 32bit at 1024x768 resolution. 800x600 Glide is garanted by the good 1998 Voodoo 2 12MB. The sound card doesn´t need introduction.
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Some Benchmarks:
3DMark 2000 "800x600 16bit" - Voodoo 2 12MB = 1570
3DMark 2000 "1024x768 16bit" - TNT2 Ultra = 1785
Benchmarks with TNT2 Ultra:
Quake 2 @1024x768 16bit max set – 58.0 fps
Quake 2 @1152x864 16bit max set – 52.7 fps
Quake 2 @1280x960 16bit max set – 46.1 fps
Quake 3 “FourDM66” @800x600 16bit bilinear max set – 30.9 fps
Quake 3 “FourDM66” @1024x768 16bit bilinear max set – 30.4 fps
Quake 3 “FourDM66” @1280x1024 16bit bilinear max set – 28.2 fps
MDK2 @800x600 32bit bilinear max settings – 35.74 fps
Unreal @800x600 16bit max settings – 37.94 fps
Unreal @1024x768 16bit max settings – 34.92 fps
Unreal @1280x960 16bit max settings – 28.81 fps
Unreal Tournament @1024x768 16bit max settings – 31.27 fps
Unreal Tournament @1280x960 16bit max settings – 29.99 fps
Unreal Tournament @1600x1200 16bit max settings – 23.3 fps
