First Gander You might not be able to actually buy a Coppermine Pentium III right now, but early results from the RegMark Institute suggest you might want to put an order in - at least for one of the 100MHz FSB variants. As one of the lucky few to have a 700MHz/100MHz FSB CuMine to try, we can report that it runs just fine in an Intel Sun River SR440BX, despite the BIOS initially refusing to let it run any faster than 650MHz - a quick tweak with NEWSPEED.EXE soon put things right. Although the test machine was running Win2K RC2, which no doubt slows things down a tad, it still delivered a commendable 2029.5 MIPS and 800.7MFLOPS, according to WinTune 98. This compared pretty favourably to an identical Sun River equipped with a 500MHz Deschutes PIII running Win98SE, which returned 1452.9MIPS and 574.3MFLOPS. We also tried the 600MHz Deschutes under Win98 in a Seattle 2 mobo, where it performed roughly on a par with the Win2K machine. One of our readers memorably described Coppermine as "a chip you can't find, for a platform that doesn't work, using memory you can't afford". But the performance of the 100MHz Cumine seems to suggest that sticking with the 100MHz FSB parts might not be such a daft option after all. And having had our fingers burned (literally) by early Pentium IIIs, we were also mightily impressed by the cool performance of the 0.18 micron Cumine, which suggests it might be quite happy running a bit faster -- watch this space.