To test the particular gaming performance of Duron and the Thunderbird, we ran the usual gaming benchmark, timedemo 001 of Quake III Arena in different settings, and resolutions.

Here are the exact settings for each test:

.High Quality

• GL Driver Default
• GL Ext On
• Video Mode 800x600
• Color Depth 32bit
• Full Screen ON
• lighting Lightmap
• Geometric Detail Medium
• Texture detail <scale default>
• Texture Quality 32bit
• texture filter triliniear
  

Normal 

• GL Driver Default
• GL Ext On
• Video Mode 640x480
• Color Depth Default
• Full Screen ON
• lighting Lightmap
• Geometric Detail Medium
• Texture detail <scale default>
• Texture Quality Default

Freed from the bottleneck imposed by the graphic card, the processors can now give a real sense of their power. Even if we give the Pentium III the   5% increase in its expected performance on a BX based motherboard, the Duron is still a very good competitor. A 700 MHz Thunderbird, on the other hand---with a larger cache--finishes slightly ahead of the Pentium III 600 (if the 5% difference is factored in).

Overclocking:

As we said earlier, we only managed to overclock the Duron and the Thunderbird by pushing the front side bus to 110 MHz (effectively 220, the board uses a double data rate bus, remember?) The MSI K7TPro allows overclocking of the FSB through the BIOS but the board does not have any other options for overclocking.