All three of the new CPUs are Pentium IIIs, each manufactured using Intel's new .18 micron manufacturing process, and each offering the integrated L2 cache and other improvements of the Coppermine core.

They differ only in their raw MHz level, and the system bus they're intended to utilize.

CPU Bus Speed P3-750 100MHz only P3-800 100MHz only P3-800B 133MHz only

You may be wondering why Intel continues to produce CPUs that operate at just the 100MHz bus speed, and your answer lies in the millions of established 440BX mainboards Intel has sold over the past two years.

Add in the newly designed, yet economic i810 mainboards, which also utilize a 100MHz system bus, and the reasoning for keeping the slower bus speed alive is clear.

For i820 or i840-based mainboard owners the upgrade path is simple, as Intel CPUs using either 100 or 133MHz system bus speeds can be utilized.

Aside from the bus speed differences, all three of these new CPUs are true-blue .18 micron Coppermine CPUs.

Lets look now at how they perform under testing.

To compare the relative performance of the newer Intel CPUs to the current Pentium III line, we threw in the scores from a P3-733 and P3-667 CPU respectively.

We know readers love to see how the Athlon stacks up to Intel's best, and to that end we've chosen the Athlon 700 and Athlon 750 for this article.

Here are the system level specs for the PCs we used during testing:

i820 Test Systems:
Gigabyte GA-7CX i820 Mainboard
Hercules Dynamite TNT2 Ultra (Set to operate at 175/200MHz)
128MB PC800 RDRAM
Western Digital Expert 18.1GB UDMA HD
Sound Blaster Live PCI Audio Card
Toshiba 6X DVD-ROM