Hardware Guru Tom Pabst heeft zijn review van het KX133 reference moederbord online gezet. Tom ontdekte dat de KX133 vooral onder 3D games een vrij redelijke voorsprong heeft ten opzichte van de AMD Irongate chipset. Niet geheel onverwacht is dit niet te wijten aan AGP 4x, maar meer aan PC133 geheugen.
Verder iets vrij opmerkelijks: uit de SPECviewperf benchmarks bleek dat (totaal tegen de verwachtingen in) de KX133 erg slecht presteert onder NT, terwijl onder het brakke Win98 de scores veel hoger liggen. Nu draait elke workstation haar OpenGL-software onder NT, dus dit kan gezien worden als een vrij groot probleem. Tom vermoedt dan ook dat er hier sprake is van bewuste manipulatie:
I can't help it, but that really stinks! Coppermine scores higher under NT than under Win98, which is what everybody would expect. It also scores way higher than Athlon under NT, something nobody would expect. Running SPECviewperf under Windows98 (what no sane person would ever do) reveals that Athlon's Win98-scores are not only higher than Coppermine's Win98-scores, they are even higher than some of Coppermine's NT-scores! Athlon's Win98-scores prove that this processor can run OpenGL-software on GeForce very well, but under NT, where those scores are important, Athlon performs miserably. Could it be that somebody who doesn't want Athlon to look good on workstations is trying to make sure that either GeForce's (and thus Quadro's) NT-driver runs really bad as soon as it detects an Athlon-processor, or is there some strange anti-Athlon-software in WindowsNT's latest service pack? Many of you will know that Quadro, a NVIDIA GeForce-chip with 64 MB DDR-memory, is an extremely good high-end OpenGL-performer and will thus sell very well in the workstation area. Making sure that Athlon performs really badly with this graphics card almost means barring Athlon's well-deserved way into the workstation-segment. The SPECviewperf-scores under Windows98 prove that there's certainly no hardware problem between GeForce and Athlon. They also prove that Athlon is actually performing better than Coppermine in OpenGL. The fishy scores under NT raise some serious questions towards NVIDIA, Microsoft and also AMD, since nobody there seems to have noticed this issue early enough. [break]Hieronder de eindconclusie van Tom; moeten we de KX133 allemaal gaan kopen?'[/break]If you are an end-user you certainly want to know if I recommend motherboards with this chipset. My answer is simple. If you are planning to buy an Athlon platform you should not possibly miss it. If you already own an Athlon-system with AMD's 750 chipset and if you mainly run office applications or web-software then I can't see any reason why you would have to swap your current motherboard with a KX133-board. Office applications hardly benefit from higher memory-throughput, something that makes Intel-platforms with i820 or i840 chipsets completely unattractive to office users as well. Gamers have to decide if the 5-7% in gaming performance offered by KX133 are reason enough to say goodbye to their old Irongate-boards.
Voor meer info, check hier de rest van Tom's review!
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't lag gewoon aan de GeForce drivers. Kijk nog maar eens nu er een update staat!
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