=> It becomes obvious that Tom's Hardware were running the PIII-S 1.4Ghz at 100Mhz FSB! So they're really running the CPU at 1050Mhz! What do you expect! Of course it will loose in every bench!
Wow. You couldn't have misunderstood that more if you had tried. They ran it at 1.4GHz with a 133Mhz FSB. They <i>overclocked</i> their motherboard. As the article said, their motherboard <i>will</i> allow it to be done, however because the AGP ends up running over-spec to do it, the AGP automatically reverts from 2x down to 1x in order to keep the video card stable.
Since the performance of games can be heavily impacted by running at AGP 1x instead of AGP 2x, this means that any chips that they ran with a 133MHz FSB will have poor performance in some of the benchmarks. They still ran at a 133MHz FSB, they just ran at AGP 1x instead of AGP 2x.
The P3 Coppermine 866Mhz and the P3 Tualatin 1400MHz are both 133MHz FSB CPUs, and thus both required the motherboard to be OCed to 133MHz FSB, resulting in only AGP 1x being used instead of AGP 2x.
The P3 Coppermine 700MHz and the Celeron 1300MHz are both 100MHz FSB CPUs. The motherboard officially supports that, so nothing was out of spec to support their FSBs. Thus the AGP slot ran at it's full speed of 2x.
The only thing ever 'underclocked' was the AGP port occasionally being at 1x instead of 2x. None of the CPUs were ever run under spec.
And technically, the AGP overclocked to 89MHz at 1x is still faster than standard AGP 1x at 66MHz. (But still slower than the theoretical 133MHz of 2x.)
My suspicions were raised since I know for a fact that the PIII-S 1.4Ghz EASILY out runs a P4 1.7Ghz when ran at its TRUE speed. The PIII-S 1.4Ghz is just a little slower than the Athlon running at 1.4Ghz. And we all know the Athlon spanks P4, clock for clock.
No offense, but judging by your posts what you "know for a fact" could be fit into a thimble. You're forgetting some vastly important aspects here. First of all, we know absolutely nothing about the P4 1.7GHz system that they set up. For all that we know, it could have been run with RDRAM or even on a quality mobo with DDR SDRAM and performed <i>much</i> better than you seem to give it credit for. Second, the BX motherboard does supports <i>only</i> AGP 2x and lower. (And again, in the case of when it was overclocked to support CPUs with a FSB of 133MHz, it only ran at AGP 1x.) This would severely limit what the video card could do compared to the P4 running on a motherboard with AGP 4x. So of course the P3 1.4GHz chip is going to get 'spanked' in gaming benchmarks because of the <i>massive</i> bottleneck at the AGP alone.
But then if we also look at the memory used, the P3 1.4GHz is running with PC133. The P4 1.7GHz is obviously running with either DDR266 or better. (My guess is PC800.) So now the P3 1.4GHz is also being 'spanked' in both memory latency and memory bandwidth compared to the P4 1.7GHz.
To top it off, the P4 has SSE2 support, which the P3 doesn't have. So any applications with SSE2 optimizations (or even just P4 optimizations for that matter) are going to see the P4 1.7GHz trounce the P3 1.4GHz. And let's not forget the P4 has a <b>300</b>MHz clock-speed lead on the P3.
In a <i>properly</i> configured P3 system, the P3 would score significantly better, having access to AGP4x. (It's arguable if a VIA chipset with DDR would have helped the P3 any though.) A same MHz Athlon would have the availability of even better hardware (such as a dual-channel DDR nForce2 mobo) and have scored significantly better yet. And of course a top-notch P4 configuration would do at least as well as the Athlon when comparing PR to MHz. The P3 however is just plain old technology running on old technology, and to have run it on a BX motherboard is hindering it even more. So of <i>course</i> it got trounced by the P4. It never stood a chance. This is no way indicates the P3 having been underclocked. It's like comparing a 747 to a Concorde. Of course the 747 is going to lose in a race.
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