Onze Russische vrienden van iXBT hebben de primeur met een review van de VIA Apollo Pro133, de eerste chipset met officiële support voor PC133 SDRAM. Serieuze concurrentie voor Intel?
As we have expected, the main trump of VIA Apollo Pro133 is still its price, which is twice as low as that of i440BX. And from all other points, except a great number of various integrated features, of view VIA Apollo Pro is none other than a huge disappointment. VIA Apollo Pro133 will have absolutely no practical value until the appearance of some new processors working with 133MHz FSB. And as soon as they appear, Intel will introduce its own core logic right away. VIA's chances to dominate in the chipset market are equal to naught, because their chipsets are considerably worse in terms of memory and AGP than those by Intel. As far as VIA's main argument is concerned, namely the support of a PC133 memory, which is cheaper than RDRAM, it is no longer that powerful, because Intel has also introduced PC133 SDRAM support in its i820 chipset last MCH. So, VIA Apollo Pro will most likely compete with i810e - a cheaper Pentium III chipset with the integrated graphics.
Check de info en benchmarks bij iXBT Labs.
