Pentium III Hits 500 MHz!!!

You might think Intel just released the Pentium III. But take a close look at the label and you'll see that it's actually the Pentium !!!

Microprocessors rarely inspire sentiments commensurate with three exclamation points. Does this long-awaited top-of-the-line chip live up to its breathless billing?

Systems based on the PIII-500 gush speed, outrunning all other Windows 98 desktop machines we've tested. But the new chip offers more than the next step on the megahertz staircase. Intel has also given the PIII a total of 70 new processor instructions designed to accelerate specially written games, Internet plug-ins, graphics, and speech recognition applications. Our preliminary tests show that this technology may add real muscle to those tasks. And this doesn't look to be a reprise of the 1997 Pentium MMX launch--this time, more software will be available that actually uses the new capabilities. Much of that software, at least initially, will cater more to gamers and multimedia mavens than to serious business users.

Unsurprisingly, PIII-500 PCs command large!!! prices. (The CPU alone costs PC vendors almost $700.) The three preproduction Dell, Gateway, and Micron PIII-500 systems we tested for this article cost between $2826 and $2899.

We also tested preproduction PIII-450 PCs from Gateway and Micron. Priced at a more palatable $2359 and $2699, respectively, they're not much slower than the PIII-500 machines. All five systems are loaded: 128MB of RAM, hard drives as large as 22GB, big monitors, and the latest 3D graphics cards with 16MB of SDRAM.

If you do image editing or other CPU-intensive work, covet the ultimate gaming machine, download and devour every browser plug-in you see, or must have this month's fastest desktop, you may already have your wallet out. But not everyone needs to spring for a PIII. If you work mostly with Microsoft Office­style apps, e-mail, and a Web browser, you can buy a very fast, feature-rich Celeron-400 PC for $1500. An even faster 433-MHz Celeron chip will arrive in mid-March, on PCs selling for about the same price. And there's one other newcomer to consider: AMD's K6-III processor.

The Name Game

Despite its name, the Pentium III doesn't represent a generational advance, as the Pentium and Pentium II did. Those chips introduced fundamental changes in processing, cache, and system bus technologies. The PIII is basically a PII processor, with the same 512KB off-chip secondary cache and 100-MHz system bus. The rationale for the new name? Marketing!!!

That said, the 70 new CPU instructions Intel calls Streaming SIMD extensions do set the Pentium III apart from its predecessors. The instructions target CPU-intensive jobs--image filtering, 3D geometry calculations, and waveform analysis--that would tax even a fast Pentium II. This change is similar to the addition of MMX instructions to Pentium processors a few years ago. And just as new applications had to be written to take advantage of MMX instructions, apps must be rewritten or updated to utilize the new SIMD extensions. Existing software will run no faster on a PIII-450 system than on a PII-450.

The Pentium III's other notable feature: Intel assigns each PIII chip it produces a unique, hard-coded ID number. In January, Intel announced this processor ID number as a boon to corporate asset management and e-commerce, but privacy advocates cried foul. (For a close look at this topic, see "Intel Adds ID Number to PIII.")

Blazing Business Apps

There's no controversy about the PIII-500's ability to sprint. Micron's $2899 Millennia 500 Max turned in a PC WorldBench 98 score of 237, the best Windows 98 score we've ever seen. This PC darts through business apps about 11 percent faster than the average PII-450 machine, and about 17 percent faster than the average PII-400--and those are no slowpokes. Dell's $2826 Dimension XPS T500 and Gateway's $2899 E-4200 500 came very close to the Millennia 500 Max's performance, with PC WorldBench 98 scores of 234 and 235, respectively.

The number 500 draws a crowd, but before you join in, take a close look at how the PIII-450 systems from Gateway and Micron did: They garnered WorldBench scores of 218 and 219--only about 7 percent slower than the PIII-500 systems. That difference will be negligible as you brood over a Word or Excel document. And these systems cost substantially less. Gateway's $2359 E-4200 450, in particular, stands out for its price. (We tested a configuration with a 10GB hard drive; Gateway submitted a similar model with a 22GB hard drive for our Top 20 Power Desktops review.) Some PC vendors, including Micron and Gateway, are dropping previous Pentium II-450 models for similarly priced Pentium III-450s. They will continue to sell PII-450s to corporate customers that prefer to standardize on the same CPU.

At press time, Intel announced a 550-MHz version of the PIII; systems based on that chip are expected to ship in the second quarter.

Quick Graphics

The PIII-500 systems looked lively in our regular suite of graphics tests, which uses applications like PowerPoint 97 that aren't enhanced for the Streaming SIMD instructions. But remember, the systems' graphics card plays a huge role in these tasks.

Gateway's 500-MHz system took top honors in all but one graphics test. But the differences between the PIII-500 systems were imperceptible without a stopwatch, except in Caligari's TrueSpace 4.1, a 3D modeling application, where the Gateway really shined.

Clearly the extra cost of a PIII-500 system doesn't buy much additional performance on these programs, compared to a PIII-450. For example, the Gateway PIII-450 took only five seconds longer to complete the PowerPoint test than Gateway's PIII-500. A PIII-450 with a good graphics card shouldn't disappoint anyone.

The Pentium III PCs have newer, better graphics cards than the Pentium II-400 machines we've examined in the past. Still, when we compared Dell's PIII-500 to an older Dell PII-400 machine, we saw no stunning performance differences in our standard tests. The PIII-500 held an edge of 4 percent in the Director test, 8 percent in the PowerPoint test, and 44 percent in the Redline Racer game test, which measures frames per second. That last gain is less impressive than it sounds, as it's hard for anyone to visually perceive more than 30 frames per second, and fast Pentium II­equipped machines already run many games at that speed.

The New Apps

We've barely dipped our toes in the pool when it comes to testing apps that capitalize on the new Streaming SIMD extensions. But it was an invigorating dip. Running preliminary versions of three enhanced apps, we saw some dramatic improvements when we stressed the systems with complex tasks and big files.

Rage's new Dispatched 3D game thrives on the SIMD extensions. We played both standard and enhanced versions of the game on 500- and 450-MHz Pentium III systems: The enhanced version pumped out about 37 to 43 frames per second; the standard version, 17 to 18 fps.

Moreover, the Pentium III should handle more visual detail and higher resolutions at 30 frames per second, Games.net reviews editor Nash Werner says. Improved resolution and color depth will allow PIII PCs to run future games at near-photographic quality, he adds. (All Pentium III systems will ship with Microsoft's DirectX 6.1 preinstalled; 3D games written to that standard should also benefit from SIMD instructions.)

To assess the Pentium III's image editing, we tried out an enhanced plug-in for Adobe Photoshop 5.0 that's designed to speed up a number of specific tasks. We tested three--including a wave distortion filter and a gradient fill--by applying them to a 20MB image and measuring the total time required to complete the operations. With Pentium III-500 and -450 machines, we consistently achieved performance gains of about 20 percent using the SIMD-enabled plug-in. If you tend to spend large portions of your day tweaking Photoshop images, you'll certainly appreciate the increased efficiency.

Intel is also touting the Pentium III's ability to accelerate streaming media downloaded from the Internet. Only one enhanced browser plug-in was ready for us to test, so we can't give a broad-based verdict on whether the new CPU lives up to that large promise. But our test of Macromedia's new Flash plug-in for streaming animation took an average of 11 percent less time on Pentium III-450­equipped systems than on otherwise identical Pentium II-450 PCs--a notable, though not breathtaking, improvement.

Better Voice Recognition?

We also peeked at perhaps the most promising benefit of the SIMD extensions: improved voice recognition programs with shorter training times and higher accuracy rates. For this purpose, we auditioned a very early PIII-enhanced version of Dragon's Point & Speak voice recognition application. We couldn't formally test it because the software was still very preliminary. And we could not tell how much of the improvement was due to the PIII extensions. Even so, long-time Dragon user Susan Fry declared it was "a vast improvement" over Dragon's NaturallySpeaking program as it runs on her Pentium II-300 PC.

Fry, a San Francisco Bay Area freelance writer, relies on voice recognition to input text since she's developed repetitive strain injuries in her wrists. She spent six months painstakingly fine-tuning her Dragon software to recognize her speech patterns and vocabulary, ultimately attaining a rate of about 90 to 95 percent accuracy. Fry was stunned by the new version's performance on a Pentium III-500 machine. "It recognized easily 95 percent after two minutes of training--I was floored," she says.

Fry also noted that the software typed words on screen quickly, almost as fast as she spoke them. Still, until Dragon's shipping version is available for testing, it's hard to tell how much of the improvement is due to the PIII extensions and how much stems from better software coding.

At press time, Intel told us that software vendors would be turning out dozens of applications optimized for the Pentium III, a good number of them by early summer. (For more information on these applications, see "Enhanced Software for Pentium III PCs," and look for follow-up coverage in next month's Top of the News).

These enhanced applications will not change most people's daily PC routine. Like the MMX instructions Intel added to its Pentium line (and all subsequent processors), the Pentium III instruction set will probably blend into the background of your PC's capabilities, offering a modest boost here and an occasional dramatic speedup there. Within a year or so, the Pentium III will simply supplant the Pentium II, just as the Pentium II replaced the original Pentium.

On the operating systems front, the newest versions of Windows are ready for the Pentium III. But unless you use Windows 98 or Windows NT 4.0, you'll forfeit the performance gains of the SIMD instructions. Both Win 98 and the upcoming Windows 2000 OS support the new instructions. Microsoft will supply a Pentium III compatibility patch for Windows NT 4.0--but not for Windows 95.

To Have or to Hold

If you have $2800 to spend on a 500-MHz Pentium III, go ahead: Enjoy. Though not everyone should pay top dollar for a Pentium III-500, these systems do provide significant performance gains on tough applications like Adobe Photoshop, and they fly through games. Tantalizing performance breakthroughs in voice recognition could present further enticement. And home-oriented, less generously configured PIII-500­equipped models can be had for something more like $2500; see Top 10 Home PCs.

But beware of buyer's remorse. Pentium III systems due in the year's second half will run at better than 550 MHz, and some will pack 133-MHz system buses, as well as speedier graphics cards. The faster system bus should be a boon to people who work with large files. By the end of the year, the Pentium III may be speeding along at 700 MHz.

And by the way, if you're thinking of purchasing a Pentium III chip and plugging it into an existing Pentium II motherboard, do your homework first: Many Pentium II motherboards are not compatible with Pentium III chips.

The rest of us looking to buy a power desktop in the short term must decide between the more reasonably priced Pentium III-450 PCs and the even cheaper Pentium II-400s. Pentium II-400s run office applications quickly enough for most people, and should sell for as little as $1700 by the time you read this. But at that price, they won't offer as rich a configuration, and they won't give you access to enhanced graphics applications, games, Web plug-ins, or voice recognition programs.

If such benefits don't matter to you, however, you should also carefully consider a sub-$1500 system that's based on a lower-cost CPU--Intel's Celeron-400 or Celeron-433, or AMD's K6-2-400.

And if you want to hedge your bets, check out a more modestly configured Pentium III-450 system. By the time you read this, Micron hopes to offer such a model for a frugal $1900. That's a Pentium III price we can get excited about--even without three exclamation points.

Testing for this story conducted by Ulrike Diehlmann, Nancy Miller, and Mike Salayko of the PC World Test Center.

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CyberMax Enthusiast KIII 400 $1799 CyberMax 888/438-2629 www.cybermaxpc.com

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Dell Dimension XPS T500 $2826 street Dell 800/388-8542 www.dell.com

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Micron Millennia 450 Max $2699 street Micron 888/634-8799 www.micronpc.com

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Micron Millennia 500 Max $2899 street Micron 888/634-8799 www.micronpc.com

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Gateway E-4200 450 $2359 street Gateway 800/315-2536 www.gateway.com

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Gateway E-4200 500 $2899 street Gateway 800/315-2536 www.gateway.com