First 300-MHz Pentium II Results

Intel's latest Pentium II processor breaks the 300-MHz x86 speed barrier.

Dave Andrews

Our tests of a 300-MHz Pentium II-based PC peg the latest Intel processor's performance at just about where you'd expect it, compared to the previous high end of Intel's x86 line, the 266-MHz Pentium II. The 300-MHz Pentium II system we tested p osted 4.24 on the BYTEmark integer tests and 5.0 on the BYTEmark FPU tests, compared to 3.8 and 4.5 for a 266-MHz system.

BYTE was able to get access for a couple hours to a precommercial Tyan Tahoe 2 ATX dual-processor motherboard equipped with the 300-MHz CPU (the secondary L2 cache bus runs at 150 MHz, while the system bus runs at 66 MHz). Unfortunately, we didn't have time to run our cross-platform Photoshop test suite on the system.

Officials at Tyan (408-956-8000; http://www.tyan.com ), which makes the Tahoe and other motherboards that support Intel's latest Pentium II, say that tweaks to the Tahoe's design should improve performance by another 3 to 5 percent. However, running the BYTEmark and Bapco Sysmark for NT 4.0 benchmarks showed performance that scaled as expected, compared to slower Pentium IIs. Systems that have the 300-MHz version of the Pentium II should be available in quantity early this summer.

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High Five for 300-MHz Pentium II

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Applications Go Faster at 300

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