Conclusion

In the past, Cyrix have made some blunders and a few successes. With the take over form VIA it looks as if the C3 CPU's have picked up a new racket and have come back into play. While these benchmark score don't seem all that impressive to us, we have to remember that this CPU is intended to replace the old K6-2 line of CPU and not to compete with AMD Duron or Intel Celeron. While VIA didn't want us to overclock the Samuel2 core, we did overclock the Samuel 1 core, the overclockability of even this old chip is quite remarkable, we managed to get our 650Mhz up to 800Mhz using the 133MHz FSB. We tested out VIA's claim that this CPU and run (unoverclocked) fanless, we placed a Global Win FOP-32 cooler with the fan disabled on the CPU and it to our delight, without a hitch - no lockups, BSOD's or GPE's. We attempted to run it fanless at overclocked speeds but anything over the default would instantly crash in Windows. With all this said and done the VIA C3 CPU did live up to what it claimed to do, stability has improved, performance has increased dramatically and overclockability has improved over the original Cyrix line, not that VIA would have to do much to make an improvement, after all, the old M2 processor wouldn't overclock at all. let's see some value 1Ghz VIA C3's, VIA