Super7 Upgrade Guide: The K6-2+ and K6-3+ Processors

Gaming Performance - Quake III Arena

In gaming performance, the jump from no on-die L2 cache to 128KB L2 cache provided quite a bit of performance increase, but brining the amount of L2 cache up to 256KB did not do as much.

The K6-2+ outperformed the standard K6-2 by 15%, quite a noticeable difference. Unfortunately, the K6-3+'s additional 128KB of L2 cache was only able to add 1 FPS to the Quake III Arena performance, for a gain of 2%.

At the battle of 550MHz, the K6-3+ was able to edge out the K6-2+ by 6%. Once again, not a really noticeable difference.

At the more realistic resolution of 1024x768x32, the results mirror those found at 640x480x32. In fact, the most that a score decreases at this much higher resolution is about 2 frames per second. This suggests that the systems are highly CPU limited, as the video card is being limited by the CPU speed. If you have a fast enough video card, switching to 1024x768x32 from a lower resolution will result in only a very slight performance drop.

Since the system is so severely CPU limited here, the results and observations remain the same as what we recorded at 640x480x32.