AMD Athlon 850

Unreal Tournament is very texture intensive making it a very AGP/memory intensive benchmark as well. It is because of its AGP/memory dependencies that the Pentium III 800 on the i820 comes out on top, the combination of AGP 4X transfer rates and the memory bandwidth capable of saturating AGP 4X keeps the i820 + RDRAM solution an expensive but top performing one.

The memory dependency of UT is made evident once again by the fact that the Pentium III 800 on the Apollo Pro 133A test bed does so well, whose 133MHz memory bus frequency masks the sub-par memory performance of the chipset.

The KX133 chipset with its 133MHz memory bus frequency distances itself from the old AMD 750 by a very noticeable margin as the Athlon 850 on our KX133 test bed was a full 32% faster than the same CPU on a SuperBypass enabled AMD 750 board. This is an issue we weren't aware of when we originally benchmarked the KX133 chipset using VIA's Reference KX133 motherboard but was later discovered when we tested the performance of shipping KX133 motherboards. This, coupled with the lower cost of the KX133 chipset, makes VIA's latest release the ideal home for the Athlon.

Increasing the resolution and color depth to 1024 x 768 x 32 simply increases the dependency of the benchmark on a fast memory bus and AGP performance. The standings remain virtually unchanged however because of the increased memory dependency we notice the Athlon 850 on a regular AMD 750 based board without SuperBypass support distancing itself from the rest of the crowd by a somewhat noticeable margin.