We'd like to issue a warning here to early adopters looking to purchase either a new Athlon-based PC, or a Pentium III-based PC within the next two months:
Neither of these current systems will offer either AGP 4X support, or 133MHz front side bus operation without a costly upgrade of their stock PC-100 SDRAM to PC-133 SDRAM, and their AGP 2X-only mainboards to currently unreleased AGP 4X mainboards.
For Pentium III buyers, rumors floating around the web point to a late September launch by Intel of the i820 Camino AGP 4X mainboard chipset, which means that their PC OEM partners will have systems with mainboards based on AGP 4X and 133MHz SDRAM for sale at that time.
AMD's future is foggier. It could be as long as three to five months from now before we see Athlon PCs with AGP 4X and PC-133 support.
Out of the three Athlon core logic chipset suppliers we listed previously, industry gossip indicates that VIA is out to an early lead with a design that will offer Intel i820-like features for Athlon mainboards.
As we gain more information on this situation it will be reported on Sharky Extreme's news page.
Thanks to the 30+ days of pre-embargo testing we were allowed with the Athlon CPUs prior to August 9th, Sharky Extreme was able to test them with a variety of both real world and synthetic benchmarks and applications.
We decided to test a large variety of apps to gage the Athlon's performance level, including apps that both do and do not offer 3DNow! support. We also threw in the results of our recently reviewed Intel P3-600 CPU, and a low end Celeron 400 CPU for comparison.