Current Cost: $910

With the 1GHz Pentium III residing only in retail systems tagged with high retail prices, we do not currently consider it an option for our High-End Gaming PC. . For the second month in a row, we are recommending the Intel Pentium III 866MHz for our High-End gaming system.

We were impressed with how the Slot 1 Pentium III 866MHz not only defeated the 850MHz Athlon in most benchmarks, it also surpassed the Athlon 1GHz in some tests. Its 256K of full speed, on-die, L2 advanced transfer cache gives this Coppermine design Pentium III the legs it needs to surpass the Athlon for our top spot. While the 1GHz Athlon's cache runs in at a larger 512K, it resides off-die and runs at less than half the processor speed.

So for the High-End Gaming PC, we now recommend the Pentium III 866MHz. It's extremely fast, though we must admit, it is quite expensive.

Read our Pentium III 866MHz review here.
Read our Pentium III 1GHz review here.