VIA Cyrix III (Samuel)

The Cyrix III from what I can gather was going to be based on a rather promising looking design from Cyrix, however VIA stepped in and seemingly ruined this by putting the design from the Centaur or Winchip team in. This has had disasterous consequences with the CPU becoming a laughing stock because of its very poor benchmarks. Its the one CPU that makes my Cyrix MII look speedy!!!!! I am trying to find a reason to reccommend this CPU to you and thinking about it I can only think of 1 and that is price. However I then think that you can get a 600 Duron for only slightly more and this is supposed to be a lot quicker than a Celeron and yet the Celeron leaves the Cyrix ...  Read the complete review

With the MII, Cyrix aimed at the budget market and at the applications and the business market, there stratagy was correct aand the chip had its purpose. With the Cyrix III I cant see what they were aiming at. They have increased the speeds of the chip so it looks as if theyare trying to compete with the like of the AMD K6-2 and the Intel Celeron, but this particular chip will not make a dent on sales as far as I am aware. The Cyrix III still has an FPU major problem, so it cant really be aimed at the mid range market. The price is still very acceptable, but I feel its about time that Cyrix made a more competative chip. I have heard that the Cyrix ...  Read the complete review

The VIACyrix III has proved to be a bit of a dissapointment although it wasnt always this way. Id readied myself since Christmas to get one of these. Up until recently the CyrixIII was based on the Joshua core from Cyrix. This was reasonably quick for the area that it was aimed at. It had a stonking great 64k L1 and 256k L2 cache with 3DNow! and was to be released at PR ratings of between 433 and 566 and be expected to ratchet up to around PR700-800 depending on how far the core could be pushed. However not long before relesase VIA chose to use the Winchip 4 core from Centaur and to be frank this core doesnt have a patch on Joshua, in fact its crap. The benchmarks have ...  Read the complete review

Suppose you had a choice between a car that looks like a Ferrari but runs like a Skoda or a car that looks like a banger in comparison but has some decent performance behind it. This is the decision that VIA had to face with its Cyrix III processor. They had to Choices, they could use the Cyrix version of the Cyrix III with its lower clock speeds or the highly scalable IDT version of the chip. Since VIA now own both of these companies, they could choose which they thought was the best and start to produce it. The launce was delayed a number of times as VIA chose which to use and it ended up being the IDT version. BIG MISTAKE!!!, the chip is slow, it ...  Read the complete review

Well, it was definitely cheap!!! To reflect of this, the quality cant be that good, but it is worth. Honestly, not everyone need that fast speed, soer, Cyrix is the best choice for them. Especially, when you most use your PC to write up your essay, why do you need a PIII or Athlon? Just a waste of money. Believe me, if you dont play 3D games, buy a cyrix! It is not that bad, especially it is now produced by Chinese rather than American, should be better now! I used MII b4, and it was 2 years ago, when i could not afford a PII, and it never crashed down, (apart from the cases I was trying some 3D games). Anyway, believe me, as you try it, you will ...  Read the complete review