Athlon good for 3d games?

[Wilan Wong]

I know that the Athlon FPU pipeline is much more powerful than that of the Pentium III, then should the performance of the 3d gmaes of the Athlon be more superior than the Pentium III? Is the enhanced 3DNow! Technology any good. Any help would be great.

[PhyrePhox]

Ya, Athlons are just as good for games as P3's. And, a lot of games are now being optimized for the athlon such as Unreal Tournament.

Plus, athlons are way cheaper, so you're always better off getting an athlon no matter what.

[Joe Six Pack]

Athlon Better than P3 :-)

Joe

[Dave2]

They are neck and neck with the P3E in games but the Athlons are much cheaper. Be prepared to run into problems when setting up an Athlon system if you don't have an Athlon approved power supply and Athlon approved memory. Initially I had stablity problems running my 2 128MB Crucial PC133 CAS 2 sticks at 133MHz. First I thought that the Abit KA7 was the problem so I exchanged it for the K7V. Still same problems. I didn't have an Athlon approved power supply so I thought that I was the problem. I bought an Antec PP303X power supply and now I have no problems running my memory at 133MHz@CAS 2 for 3 days so far. Make sure you have Athlon approved memory and Athlon approved power supply if you decide on an Athlon and you should be ok.

[Technohead]

I TOTALLY agree with you Dave

I had trouble with my Athlon700 with a 250W power supply.

Smacked a 300W in it and I was sorted.
My memory didnt seem to be a problem at all.
I have 1x64MB PC100 (Siemens CAS2)
and 1x64MB PC100 (unbranded CAS3)

Works fine now http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[Spiderdrake]

I bought an Athlon 700 and I gotta tell you, alongside my GeForce it smokes through games so well.
Yeah actually the P-3s are really, thanks to SSE, just as good. But since by price, I could get a P-3 600 or Athlon 700, which one did you think was better ?
Plus the P-3's have no good chip sets. The 440BX is old, the i820 is only good with Rambus, and the Via one is solid but not as fast as the overclocked 440BX. And overclocking isn't a great option since all your PCI cards ... basically, go with AMD for gaming -- it's solid and well priced. Just get good RAM and Powersource. Mine are ... OKAY .... so the system is mostly stable....