Intel Pentium III 933MHz 1-core Socket 370

A 933MHz relic that belongs in a retro PC, not on your desk. Buy it for nostalgia, not for work.

The numbers are rough. A single core at 0.9GHz with 256KB of L2 cache puts this in the bottom 10 percent for single and multi thread performance. PassMark gives it 142 multi, which is about what a modern budget phone's background process scores. The 133MHz front side bus was fine for 2001, but today it's a bottleneck on top of a bottleneck. Nothing surprised us here except maybe how far we've come.

Stacked against something like the AMD Ryzen 5 7600, this Pentium III isn't even in the same conversation. The Ryzen 5 has six cores, twelve threads, and modern IPC. Even a used Dell Xeon E5-2637 V2 from a decade ago will run circles around the P3 in every workload. The only reason to pick the Pentium III is if your motherboard literally cannot accept anything else.

At around 40 USD for a working unit, you're not spending much, but you're also not getting much. For retro gaming or period-correct builds, fine. For anything else, that 40 bucks is better spent on lunch or saved toward a used Ryzen 3.

This is a museum piece, not a CPU you should actually buy for anything resembling modern work. The Pentium III 933MHz was a solid chip back when Napster was a thing, but in our database it lands at a 4 out of 100 overall. The one thing to know: it's cheap, it's old, and it's only useful if you're building a retro Windows 98 or early XP machine for nostalgia.

If you're looking for a cheap upgrade to make an old PC usable for web browsing or office work, this isn't it. Go grab a used Core 2 Duo or first-gen Ryzen instead. You'll spend a little more and get a hundred times the performance.

Don't buy this for daily use. Period. If you're restoring an old Socket 370 system and need the exact era-correct chip, go for it. Everyone else should close the tab and look at literally any CPU from the last ten years.