AMD Duron 850: Getting ready for the battle

As a gaming CPU, the Duron 850 drops below a 3% advantage over the 800.  This indicates that there are other factors that are limiting performance before a faster CPU is necessarily needed.  Among the possibilities, especially under Quake III Arena, are more memory bandwidth and a faster FSB. 

The Celeron's inferior cache subsystem helps to hold it back, giving the Duron 850 close to a 20% performance advantage here.

Even with the resolution increased to 1024 x 768 x 32, the Duron 850 is able to distance itself from the Celeron 800 by over 8%.  Comparing the Celeron 800 to its predecessors you realize, once again, how much the Celeron needed the 100MHz FSB boost the 800 received just recently.