I'm quite sure the Duron and PIII would wreck the C3 as far as gaming goes. C3 is more on the level as Celeron. However, I have a Duron 750 on my desk at work and they seem about the same speed in business and graphics apps. Photoshop 5.5 actually seems to load quicker on the C3, but my machine has a 7200RPM drive unlike 5400RPM at work. Both have 512MB of PC133 RAM and VIA 686B southbridge on the mobo.

When reading reviews about the chip, you must remeber that there are currently 4 different revisions of the processor. I have the Samuel 2 (rev.3) core, but there is one newer... Ezra (rev.4). Joshua (rev.1) and Samuel (rev.2) really couldn't compete with anything.

The 800MHz C3 Tiger Direct has uses the Ezra core. You can tell because they specify 133MHz bus and .13 micron process. One thing to note about C3 is that it is a direct replacement for Intel parts. This means that as long as your Socket370 board will support an Intel chip at 800MHz, it can use a C3 regardless of what the BIOS posts it as. I think $50 for 800MHz is a good enough deal that you could just buy it to test on a spare Socket370 board.