3D Studio MAX in particular performs extremely well with an Athlon CPU, and when you're talking rendering times of over eight hours, every minute saved is golden in our book.

Expect rendering times that are 20 to 25% faster with the Athlon 600 versus a P3-600.

Although they're not nearly as crippling to a CPU as 3D Rendering programs are, Adobe's Photoshop and PhotoDeluxe software can eat into both your time and your patience very quickly, even with strong CPUs.

Thanks to the Athlon's steroid-boosted FPU, the current versions of Photoshop and PhotoDeluxe perform extremely well with the CPU right out of the box, bettering equivalent speed P3 CPUs by 18 to 22%.

You can see that given the right circumstance the Athlon can shine immediately. But what are the various circumstances that buyers are faced with when selecting upgrades or new systems?

Already you're beginning to see where this comparison is leading. Depending upon what your needs are, you'll be able to follow a different course of actionin your buying decision.

Here are a few examples:

Let's say you're a gamer who desires a strong rig for pounding out Quake3: Arena frame rates. Maybe your last major PC upgrade found you buying an Intel Celeron CPU with a 440BX mainboard. Perhaps you're languishing at 300 to 366MHz now, and you've decided that the time is right to upgrade to a powerhouse.

But let's add in the fact that you're on a tight budget. It's safe to assume this since that's what attracted you previously to the Celeron right? So you're on a budget and you want the best gaming machine your hard-earned dollars can bring you.

Scenario answer: Intel Pentium III 450

This one was simple for a few reasons. First, the buyer already owns a competent 440BX mainboard, which the P3-450 is compatible with. Second, the buyer's budget is low, which means that he can't throw away even one extra dollar on the CPU itself. The P3-450 is the choice because it's cheap ($215), and it offers SSE instruction support which in Quake3 Arena and other titles is providing a boost of approximately 20% to the net frame rate result.

In this scenario the buyer might have to upgrade from PC-66 to PC-100 SDRAM, which will be an additional cost, but it's still superior to having to choke on the thought of a brand new Athlon 500 CPU ($300) in addition to an Athlon capable mainboard ($125 - $150).