GamePC heeft een round-up gemaakt van drie verschillende Via Apollo Pro 133A plankjes, namelijk: de Abit VT6X4, de Asus P3V4X en de Soyo SY-7VCA. De Abit VT6X4 blijkt het beste van het stel te zijn:
With VIA introducing the Apollo Pro 133A chipset not to long ago, many have flocked away from Intel's 440BX and I820 based motherboards to see what all the commotion is about. In the past, the 133A chipset shocked many of us by displaying performance hits in many key areas, partially due to AGP issues and video transfer rates. Now that a few more manufacturers have hopped on to the Apollo Pro 133a bandwagon, we will be looking at ABIT's VT6X4, ASUS' P3V4X, and SOYO's 7VCA. Each motherboard supports AGP 4x, 100/133 FSB, PC133 SDRAM and the ATA66 standard. As you can guess, each motherboard tries to separate itself from the others by implementing many unique features and by trying to squeeze extra performance out of the chipset when compared to one another. So in this quick roundup, we will be focusing on the areas of performance, stability, overclockability and board design.
[...] As for the three boards, it looks like the ABIT board performed the best in standard/normal conditions on the 4.19 driver set. The ASUS board on the other hand, somewhat disappointed us with stability issues and average performance. Though the ASUS numbers were not too far behind, we expect them to change with a quick BIOS update. From what we have been hearing, ASUS has recently released a new BIOS (after we finished benchmarking, wouldn't you know it) which fixes some performance issues. It has been reported to post numbers matching if not beating the 440BX in the areas of memory and AGP. Now comes the Soyo. Although it was the only board that overclocked to a speed greater then 750MHz from our 500e, its standard performance is just plain slow. But with its plentiful FSB choices, the board should a great option for the extreme overclocker. In terms of where the Apollo Pro 133A chipset is going, we must say it started off rough and slow, but is now becoming a viable chipset that should find its way into many home systems. After all, the 440BX will be gone shortly leaving the i820 to fend for itself. Time will only tell what is going to happen next. Check back with us on Round-2 when we check back on the ASUS P3V4X using the latest BIOS.
