AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1 GHz / 800 MHz

The Thunderbird manages to pull ahead of the regular Athlon by a little bit once again, under Quake III Arena the improvement is approximately 4%. While that is far from impressive, do keep in mind that the Athlon already has a fairly hefty L1 cache that has allowed it to perfom very well in spite of its prior lack of a high speed, low latency L2 cache.

Once again for a true clock for clock CPU comparison you'd have to compare the Athlon on the KX133/KT133 to the Pentium III on a VIA 133A since the two share the same memory/AGP controller in which case the benchmarks speak for themselves. But that comparison also illustrates exactly how limited the Athlon is by its platform, with a faster memory controller and a better overall designed chipset the Athlon would most definitely pull ahead even further. But because it's being held back by the KX133/KT133 the Pentium III on the 820 platform ends up on top.

At this high of a resolution the GeForce 2 GTS we used in the tests became the limiting factor. This just goes to show you that if you're interested in playing a game at the point where the video subsystem becomes the limitation, it doesn't really matter what CPU you get as long as it is fast enough so that you aren't CPU limited before you are video card limited.