Intel Pentium III E "Coppermine" (Slot-1)

With the help of the 133MHz FSB and PC800 RDRAM Intel’s Pentium III B started to give the Athlon some competition under Windows NT. Of course, this is something we already know from our review of the Pentium III B. At the time, we speculated that an equivalently clocked Coppermine could give the Athlon some competition under Windows NT.

Now, a little over a month later, we are able to see that match up in the flesh. The resulting competition is very close, the Pentium III 733EB just barely edges out the Athlon 700 and the Pentium III 700E falls just a hair behind AMD’s flagship.

In the world of business applications L2 cache speed takes home the gold which is why clock speed matters more to performance than whether or not the CPU is using the 100 or 133MHz FSB setting. Keep this in mind as we take a look at the High-End Winstone 99 results where the rules are slightly different.