Reply 140 of 151, by LunarG
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wrote:wrote:It's strange to think that some people appear to believe that a K6-III is on a performance level with a Pentium classic. I mean, in ALU heavy tasks, a K6 MMX could actually outperform a Pentium MMX clock for clock, although the Pentium MMX had a much better FPU.
I don't think that they are on the same performance level at the same clock for FPU heavy tasks. But a Pentium 133 or even the fastest official model Pentium MMX 233 can be matched by a K6/-2/-3 running at a sufficiently high clock rate.
I think perhaps you misunderstood my point. I wasn't saying that the K6-III is slower than a Pentium classic, rather the opposite. A K6-2 at 300MHz is already noticeably faster than a Pentium MMX 233 at the majority of tasks. There are some games, pre-3D accelerators that would've possibly ran faster on the Pentium MMX, but in general, the K6-2 on a decent motherboard with a good amount of cache and fast PC100 SDRAM would be on par with a Pentium II at equal clock speeds for most desktop tasks. A K6-III with it's on-die L2 cache, was generally an excellent performer for the price. The saving for getting a K6-2 or K6-III and a decent motherboard, compared to a PII or PIII and a decent motherboard, was usually almost enough to get you a Voodoo 2, at least it was here in Norway. Pretty much a no-brainer if you were aiming for price/performance.
I'm actually impressed with how well my current K6-III 400 manages to play games like Icewind Dale, which supposedly has PIII as recommended CPU. 😀
WinXP : PIII 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 73GB SCSI HDD, Matrox Parhelia, SB Audigy 2.
Win98se : K6-3+ 500MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Matrox Millennium G400 MAX, Voodoo 2, SW1000XG.
DOS6.22 : Intel DX4, 64MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD, Diamond Stealth64 DRAM, GUS 1MB, SB16.