Picking the Winner
It's difficult deciding a "winner" and "loser" in the traditional sense of the word because each platform has its own positives and negatives.
On paper the hub architecture of Intel's 820 chipset looks pretty impressive, however, our game benchmarks tell a different story. Only synthetic benchmarks reveal the potential of 820 and suggest a more positive future for the chipset once games and applications begin to take advantage of its additional bandwidth.
For now though, the expensive price of RDRAM excludes most consumers, one 128MB RIMM currently sells for over $900!
What about 751?
Everyone knows the performance potential of AMD's Athlon processor. Since its launch last year it has won several industry awards and is available in systems from most system manufacturers.
The unknown variable in the equation is the Athlon chipset, AMD's first offering in the market. Keep in mind that AMD didn't enter the chipset market looking to dominate, they entered because they had to. AMD initially expected their partners ALi and VIA to offer chipsets upon the Athlon launch last year.
When it became apparent this wasn't goint to happen, AMD found itself forced to supply the processor and chipset or suffer the immediate consequences.
While our Stepping six 750 chipset peformed well and encountered no problems with the GeForce 256 operating in AGP 2X mode, this isn't the case with earlier steppings of the 750 chipset. AMD deserves credit for delivering such a powerful product on their first attempt and we look forward to their future Athlon chipsets.
VIA: value solution no more
Based on our experience with VIA's Apollo Pro133 chipset we were really curious to see how the Apollo Pro133A performed. While the Apollo Pro133 looks like a great chipset on paper and offers good performance in everyday applications, gaming performance is a different story. We're not talking 5 or 6 frames here folks, in lower resolution tests where the performance of the CPU is better represented our Apollo Pro133 systems lagged by double digits in framerate.
While the Apollo Pro133A didn't come out on top in any of the tests we conducted, it closed the gap significantly. In many situations you'll hardly notice the difference between the Apllo Pro133A and the other chipsets represented here. Considering the features it supports, the performance it offers, and the great price of motherboards based on this chipset we expect it to be a very popular product for VIA.
Where does that leave the BX chipset?
Despite its age the BX chipset is right up there with the other chipsets in this roundup. It may not officially support the 133MHz bus or AGP 4X operation but the numbers speak for themselves: the BX is still a contender!
However, we're not suggesting everyone flock to the BX platform. Top tier BX motherboards such as our BE6-II still cost upwards of $140 at retail, despite the fact that the BX chipset has been "replaced" by Intel's 800 series of chipsets.
What we are saying is that those who own BX motherboards which support the "Coppermine" Pentium III processor may want to consider keeping their motherboard for the immediate future. The BX chipset is still very fast in our tests at 100MHz; once the system bus is overclocked to 133MHz (and thus the AGP and PCI buses are also overclocked) it eclipses the other 133MHz system bus chipsets from Intel and VIA. Due to time constraints we weren't able to attempt overclocking with the 820 or Apollo Pro133A systems.
VIA's Athlon chipset (the KX133) should begin hitting the retail market at the end of the month and be available in volume in March. Once we get our hands on one we'll update this roundup with the new numbers. Until then, thanks for reading!
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