Processor

AMD Athlon K7 550 @ 650 Core @ 800mhz
Rated Speed is 848 MHz - 800MHz @106 MHz bus setting. K7550MTR51B with K7650 Core
FPO -219946037213
L2 Cache is 3.3ns
L2 Divider is 2/5 Voltage is 1.9V
Heatsink temp is 44.7C Max
CPU temp taken in front of the core is 47.4C Max

The first thing is that I want you to make sure that you download VIA's patch for the PCI Bus-master and AGP Driver. I didn't do this and it took me forever to figure out why my video card constantly crashed in video games and couldn't run 3D Mark Max 2000. I also couldn't run the AGP data transfer rate benchmark in Final Reality. The only game that this was not the case in was Unreal Tournament, and that was because of their D3D DLL they released for people that were having problems similar to mine. I can't say that VIA's patch will end all of your problems but it should end the majority of them.

One of the biggest reasons that the Athlon outperforms the P3's is its big 128 KBs of L1 cache along with its 512kb of off die cache L2 cache. Athlon's also feature superior branch prediction compared to current Pentium 3/Coppermines that furthers the Athlon's performance lead. The only deficiency of this Athlon is that despite the processor is running at 850mhz the l2 cache is only running at 212 MHz. That gives the Coppermines a chance to compete since they have on-die full processor speed cache. I can't wait until AMD starts equipping their Athlon's with full speed on die cache because they are going are blazing fast.

The Athlon is a very fast processor, and when it's running at 850 mhz you will have a fast processor that can play games for a few yrs to come. The only thing that you will have to do is upgrade your video card once a year. You've all read the same benchmarks 400 times and most of them show that the Athlon is faster than the Pentium 3 and a little faster/equal in some cases when compared to the Coppermine.

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