The detail of the memory benchmark below shows the reason why it is recommended that the K6-III system should still be equipped with a cache. With external L3 cache enabled, you can see that the performance comes down in a ladder fashion. As you can see, the K6-2's memory performance sharply drops starting at the 40KB mark. After that, both CPUs faced another drop at 1200KB level, where even the motherboard's 1MB cache isn't enough to be of help. 6601.3 832.49 Figures given are SysBench totals for each category.
Higher numbers are better.
Well, I might be a little biased, but I'm honest to goodness surprised that I can see such dramatic improvement on memory performance compared to the K6-2. It's no wonder that AMD is happily demonstrating the K6-III 400 beating Pentium II 450 systems wherever they can. For a lot of Super 7 power users who need more than 256MB of main memory, there's always been a problem about not being able to find a 2MB cache equipped motherboard. There's only one that I know of that comes with 2MB cache, and even that has a few drawbacks compared to other popular Super 7 motherboards. With the recent price cut, I'm happy to say that I strongly recommend the AMD K6-III to those who would like to upgrade or build a new system.