It was just last month that we reviewed the Athlon 750MHz (which only became available in retail this week) and Intel's Coppermine Pentium III 733MHz. At the time of our reviews and according to our roadmaps, those two CPUs were meant to be the last to be released by either camp in 1999. Supposed to be… just like the 700MHz Athlon was to be the last port of call for AMD in 1999 and just like the Pentium III 'Coppermine' 667Mhz was originally slated to be the final CPU for Intel in 1999.

Now here we are only a month later with an Intel Pentium III 750MHz and 800MHz release and AMD Athlon 800MHz "on the way". Hand bags at six paces, maybe? With only two real x86 competitors in Intel & AMD, today we take a look at AMD's fastest offering yet in the Athlon series and investigate just how it stacks up against Intel's best.

Whilst we do enjoy test driving these incredibly fast CPUs, we don't enjoy doing so at the end users expense. If you bought an Athlon 700MHz or an Intel Pentium III 733MHz last month, you are probably reeling. Not because it's not fast (it is) but because you no longer feel that you've gotten your money's worth. Only a month later the price of your pride an joy gets slashed by 25% not to mention that you will probably be 'mid range' now with a 'newer' model having taken its position at the top.

The 'MHz war' has quite frankly reached 'overkill' proportions and is, in our opinion, biting the hand that feeds it (that would be all of us, the end users). Is it any coincidence that Intel announced their Pentium III 800 yesterday and that we're reviewing an AMD Athlon 800MHz today? Whilst we can all be grateful that Intel isn't the only player and that AMD is now considered such a major player, those of us that pride ourselves on having the fastest CPU are getting to wave that title about for ever shorter period's of time.