Introduction
Only a few days ago we published our , where we tried to find the best mainstream platform for Intel's fancy Pentium III/Coppermine processor. We only looked at Intel's 820 chipset and VIA's Apollo Pro 133A, and the VIA-chipset came out as the clear price/performance winner. This review will be a lot different.
Intel's 440BX-Chipset at 133 MHz FSB
First of all I finally decided to include the good old and still very beloved 440BX-chipset from Intel, which is not certified for 133 MHz FSB. Still several people sent me emails claiming that an overclocked BX at 133 MHz FSB is a rather feasible solution. I tried it out and realized that I had to agree indeed.
RDRAM-platforms ...Why Not Testing PC700 and PC600 RDRAM as well?
The next thing that all we reviewers tended to forget is an important issue with RDRAM. While all reviewers, including myself, used to do Intel the favor of using nothing else than PC800 RDRAM in our platform tests so far, the reality out in the computer stores looks a whole lot different. Due to serious problems in producing PC800 RDRAM, most RDRAM-systems that are shipping today are using PC700 RDRAM. We also included PC600 RDRAM in this test suite, because it is available, it's the cheapest RDRAM and it still claims superiority over SDRAM.
Intel 840 - The RDRAM King
Finally I decided to also include Intel's 840 chipset into this overview. Platforms with this chipset tend to be even more expensive than i820-platforms, but it offers you can get from an RDRAM-solution right now.
Considerations
This article will be filled with a huge amount of information and test data. To make this data easy enough to digest and understand, I will have to give a whole lot of explanations about the different platforms. If you want to make sure that you will understand the significance of the data I am going to present, I would suggest you read through those explanations beforehand.
