VIA Cyrix III 533, 600MHz (4/4)
Posted by Wesley on| Benchmark | Celeron | Cyrix III | ||
| 466MHz | 533MHz | 600MHz | ||
| 3DMark 2000 | Overall (1024x768 16bit) | 1234 | 972 | 1029 |
| CPU Speed | 69 | 50 | 53 | |
| Quake3 Arena v1.11 (fps) | 640x480 HQ | 35.0 | 24.0 | 25.9 |
| 800x600 HQ | 23.6 | 21.6 | 22.9 | |
| 1024x768 HQ | 15.0 | 15.0 | 16.2 | |
Let's now look at 3D performance. Duron benchmarks are not available because they were not tested with the same video card. As expected, Celeron easily beats Cyrix III again, despite the fact that Celeron being benchmarked was clocked 12% lower. Take a look at Quake 3 Arena's 640x480 results, which are heavily influenced by CPU performance because it is relatively low-bandwidth, and video card chipset's speed or other subsystem is not much of a bottleneck. That's right - since Q3A's not heavily 3DNow! optimized, Cyrix III's weak FPU performance shows through. In case of 1024x768, though, because of the FSB being twice as wide as Celeron, the score gets slightly better, covering the deficiency in raw power.
This just goes on to show that Cyrix III is certainly NOT meant for gaming. If you're planning to build a cheap, but capable gaming system, there's no better choice than Duron, which is only about $30 more expensive and should offer better performance than even Celeron shown here.
The screen above was taken at the boot time when testing Cyrix III 600MHz. You can see Cyrix III's name on the screen here, but I couldn't get this nor get the system to boot at all. Why? Because BIOS was a bit old and couldn't recognize the chip. Thankfully, I was able to get a more recent BIOS supporting Cyrix III and was able to continue the testing. Just a reminder for those of you planning to get a Cyrix III - get the BIOS updated first.
Alrighty.. This review was meant to be a short 2-page review... sigh. But it is not, as you can see... It's a good thing I'm finally on the last page. Now for the conclusion. For people in the business who'd like to get their systems as cheap as possible should get this chip. As an added bonus(?), the employees would be discouraged from playing games at work while not affecting productivity of the usual business applications.
For the average users and people who are already enthusiastic of the computer hardware so much that he/she was actually able to visit/read this page should avoid this chip like plague.Having said that, you'd probably wonder why I would devote twice the amount of pages to show you such a terrible CPU at work. This is because I was so frustrated in reviewing the chip that I wanted to show you everything I thought about it. Pull out the benchmarks and this could've been a rant.
Yawn.. I need sleep again. Oh, yeah, don't forget to type away your opinions on the discussion board!