Intel Pentium III

What do you need to take advantage of the Pentium III and its SSE instructions? First of all, the current Pentium III processors will run perfectly fine in all Slot-1 motherboards provided that they have been upgraded to the latest revision of the motherboard's BIOS with support for the Pentium III. Ideally the voltage regulator on the motherboard should have support for the 1.8v core voltage the Pentium III requires, although the sample AnandTech received did not exhibit any erratic behavior at the 2.0v setting. The long term effects of running a Pentium III at 2.0v have not been investigated, and could potentially be hazardous to the life of your processor, so your best bet is to keep the processor running at the specified 1.8v setting. There have been reports of Pentium III processors specified for operation at 2.0v core, however as far as Intel is concerned, the Pentium III is specified for operation at 1.8v only (1.6v for mobile units).

Other than that, the Pentium III runs using the standard 100MHz FSB with a 5.0x clock multiplier, and since the multiplier is locked at 5.0x your motherboard does not even have to support the 5.0x clock multiplier setting (clock multipliers are functions of the CPU not of the motherboard), the bare minimum requirements being support for the 100MHz FSB and the 1.8v core voltage.

On the software end of things, there are three major ways to take advantage of SSE: 1) if the software is specifically written to take advantage of SSE, 2) if the video card drivers are specifically written to take advantage of SSE, or 3) if the application uses DirectX 6.1 which has native support for SSE, although the performance differences are seemingly negligible if DirectX 6.1 is the only thing taking advantage of SSE.

Video card manufacturers such as ATI, Matrox and nVidia have already announced Pentium III SSE compliant drivers, you can expect more to follow in the future as the standard grows.

The Socket-7/Super7 Test System Configuration was as follows:

• AMD K6 233, AMD K6-2 300, AMD K6-3 450 (engineering sample)
• FIC PA-2013 w/ 1MB L2 Cache
• 64MB PC100 SDRAM
• Western Digital Caviar AC35100 - UltraATA
• Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Video Card (8MB) - All other Benchmarking
• Canopus Pure3D-2 Voodoo2 (12MB) - Glide Tests
• Canopus Spectra 2500 AGP TNT Video Card (16MB) - OpenGL/Direct3D tests
• VIA AGP GART Drivers v2.9
• VIA Bus Master IDE Drivers
• VIA PCI IRQ Remapping Drivers

The Pentium II comparison system differed only in terms of the processor and motherboard in which case the following components were used:

• Intel Celeron 300, Intel Celeron 300A, Intel Pentium II 400, Intel Pentium II 450, Intel Pentium III 500
• ABIT BX6 Revision 2.0 Pentium II BX Motherboard

The Pentium Pro comparison system differed only in terms of the processor and motherboard in which case the following components were used:

• Intel Pentium Pro 200 (256KB L2), Intel Pentium II OverDrive 333 (512KB L2)
• Octek Rhino P6 Pro Socket-8 FX Motherboard

The following drivers were common to both test systems:

• MGA G200 Drivers v1677_426
• nVidia TNT 0.48 drivers (Detonator Drivers were used in the SSE Drivers Comparison)
• DirectX 6.1
• Quake 2 v3.20 w/ 3DNow! Support enabled when applicable

The benchmark suite consisted of the following applications:

• Ziff Davis Winstone 98 under Windows 98
• Ziff Davis Winstone 99 under Windows 98 & Windows NT4 SP4
• Quake 2 v3.20 using demo1.dm2 and Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo
• Naturally Speaking Professional Speech Recognition Software
• Microsoft Netshow Encoder
• Adobe Photoshop 5.02
• Dispatch by Rage Software w/ SSE support

All Winstone tests were run at 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color, all gaming performance tests were run at 800 x 600 x 16 bit color. 3DNow! support was enabled when applicable.

For the in-depth gaming performance tests Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo was used to simulate the worst case scenario in terms of Quake 2 performance, the point at which your frame rate will rarely drop any further.  In contrast, the demo1.dm2 demo was used to simulate the ideal situation in terms of Quake 2 performance, the average high point for your frame rate in normal play.  The range covered by the two benchmarks can be interpreted as the range in which you can expect average frame rates during gameplay.