Johan De Gelas van Ace's Hardware heeft even de tijd genomen om een Pentium III moederborden roundup in elkaar te zetten. In zijn artikel bespreekt hij twee i815E en twee Apollo Pro 266 borden: de AOpen AX37 Pro (Pro266/DDR), MSI Pro 266 (Pro266/DDR/SDR), de Gigabyte 6OXE (i815E/SDR) en als laatste de MSI i815e Pro. Ter vergelijking zijn ook de benchmarkresultaten (Adobe Premiere, Visual C++, MPEG-2 encoding, Mercedes Benz Truck Racing, MDK2) van het Chaintech 6AJR4 Pro133A plankje verwerkt.
In zijn conclusie laat Johan weten weinig gecharmeerd te zijn van de performance van VIA's P3 DDR-platform, dat (zoals bekend) nauwelijks sneller, maar wel nog steeds duurder is dan een BX of i815 setup. Lees hieronder vast wat meer uit het verhaal:
We have talked a lot about the Athlon/Duron platform lately, so we thought it might be time to give you an update on the current status of Pentium III chipsets and motherboards. The Pentium III may be slightly slower than the Athlon, but there are still a lot of people that prefer Intel processors to those from AMD. At Ace's Hardware, we love new architectures, but few people make their purchase decision based on this.
As we've seen from these results, there is no really compelling reason to upgrade to one of these options if you already own a 440BX motherboard. The BX motherboards perform more or less the same as the VIA Apollo Pro133A options, even though they use a lower FSB setting (100 MHz).
MSI's i815 E Pro is slightly more stable than its VIA Pro266 counterpart, and is less expensive to boot. This is a clear indication that, despite the use of DDR SDRAM with the VIA Pro266, Intel's i815 EP chipset is still slightly better than the best VIA has to offer. This makes the VIA Apollo Pro266 boards rather unattractive, while the upgrade costs are relatively high given the requirement of new memory in almost all cases.