Via Cyrix III

TerrorFirmer

I'm recently looking for a Socket 370 processor between 450-700 mhz but so far all I've been offered is a Celeron 466mhz and a VIA Cyrix III 650mhz.

Now I've never really encountered a VIA chip before as they aren't very common in recent times (at least not in my case/circumstances anyway), I've used K6-2's and Celerons a good bit but I've really no idea how well the VIA chip stacks up to these two, apart from the fact that the clockspeed is not a true indication of its performance....

So which would be better, would someone say? A Celeron 466mhz or Via Cyrix 650mhz? Would be used for playing old games like HL or UT. I tried online to find a definate test with the VIA chip being tested against another chip but I couldn't really find anything...

Thanks.

Carragherisgod

I'd stay well away from the Cyrix. They're ok for word processing but that's about it. Go with (God it kills me to say this (huge AMD fan)) the Celeron

Khannie

The cyrix is a better chip.

wikipedia wrote:

Because the 6x86 was more efficient on an instruction-per-instruction basis than Intel's Pentium

They used to (nearly) keep pace with AMD in the olden days.

Carragherisgod

Khannie wrote:

They used to (nearly) keep pace with AMD in the olden days.

Yeah this is true. But those were the old K5/K6 models. I'd more than seriously doubt a Cyrix could match even the cheapest Celeron/Sempron model now. I have an old Pentium I @ 500mhz that would whoop the Cyrix. Just gotta dig it up from the back yard :cool:

TerrorFirmer

Carragherisgod wrote:

Yeah this is true. But those were the old K5/K6 models. I'd more than seriously doubt a Cyrix could match even the cheapest Celeron/Sempron model now. I have an old Pentium I @ 500mhz that would whoop the Cyrix. Just gotta dig it up from the back yard :cool:

Yeah but this is a pretty old Cyrix chip we're talking about, I was only interested in basically knowing "What would a 650mhz Cyrix III be equal to in pentium/celeron terms"? One one hand I have khannie saying the 650mhz Cryrix would be better then a 466mhz Celeron, you guys on the other side, and I can't find any side by side comparisons online...so I'm still a bit confused

Khannie

Have a look at the wikipedia page on cyrix. I'm basing my comments mostly on memory that megahertz for megahertz I remember them being more or less equivalent to the intel chips. I have to say, I think you'd be hard pushed to find a processor from that era where the intel chip outperformed it by 40% (per megahertz). (650 / 466 = 1.4 (ish)).

If you can try both chips, I'd say go for it. I'm sure they're cheap as chips.

Carragherisgod

This might help you decide http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2001jan/chi20010122003909.htm . It's an old article but then again it's an old CPU so ....

QUOTE:*It's just not worth it to buy a Cyrix III when the Celeron can be had for the same price and offers better performance in the same motherboards

:cool:

zilog_jones

Via C3s have miniscule L2 caches in comparison to even PII-based Celerons. There's a THG review comparing the 1GHz Via C3 to a Celeron 667 and Celeron 1.3GHz, and results were kinda crappy - it was comparable to the higher Celeron with Quake III, but sucked at every other test (inlcuding UT). And those tests were done using on-board graphics - I'd like to see how well or badly it does when pushing a real amount of polygons with a real graphics card.

So to answer your question, I can almost guarantee that the Celeron is better. Might be OK for overclocking too

I was considering getting a C3 a while back too (2004), but instead I got a second-hand PIII-933 for about €30 on the bay - they seem to be going a bit cheaper now. That plus a GF2 Ti and half a gig of RAM got it running BF1942 pretty comfortably, and with a GF4 I can play Counter Strike 1.5 @ 1600x1200 with a (mostly) OK framerate ^_^

TerrorFirmer

Great links, thanks guys, thats exactly what I was looking for.

Although Zilog that link you provided seems a bit unfair - Running Quake III and UT in OpenGL and D3d modes respectively on integrated chipsets that old was bound to produce pathetic results regardless of the processor, surely running UT in the software renderer mode would have yielded a better result! I have a friend who runs UT in software mode, he can run it at high settings fine, but at only about 5fps in Direct3D mode due to a crappy integrated graphics solution...so a D3d/GL bench can be 100% misleading when comparing cpus if using a crappy graphics card, in that test the Celeron can barely render UT at 640x480 in D3d yet with a proper card a 667 celeron could easily run UT at 1024x768 and 30-40fps.

It would definately be much more interesting to see benchmarks with each system using a proper dedicated card...

Thanks anyway lads, appreciated - didn't realise the Via chips were so well designed power consumption wise, can even be run passively! Thats pretty cool, they'd make great office task chips

edit: Googling the graphics chipset shows it's an 8mb integrated chip, truly horrific, I can't believe they even GOT Quake III to run on it whatsoever......those benches would be pretty much similar to comparing a P4 and An Athlon Xp on something demanding like Battlefield 2 and then using some acient card to run it! Bit strange...

Second edit: But regardless of the strange bench setup, its still obvious the Celeron is generally much better, so I think I'll opt for the 466mhz Celeron, thanks for the help lads.

weeder

ive got a 1GHz P3 for €25 if you want it....

TerrorFirmer

Would be good weeder but unfortunately the board I'm using only takes up to 700mhz

weeder

ive got a board too its a via but the capqcitors are starting to bulge on it so i doubt it has long left