VIA Apollo KX133 Athlon Chipset - Part 1

The Naturally Speaking tests focus heavily on memory transfers which is why you can see the fairly large performance range.  As we would expect, at the bottom of the list we have the regular AMD 750 chipset with its 100MHz memory bus. 

Virtual Channel SDRAM does seem to have some positive effect here as using it on the KX133 does improve performance slightly over using regular SDRAM.  However, the performance difference is well under 1% so once again, there is no real reason to go crazy if you can’t find VC SDRAM to use with your new system.

The move to the 133MHz memory bus does seem to help out quite a bit here, as we would expect it to because of the memory bandwidth dependent nature of the Naturally Speaking test (it converts an audio file to text on the fly). 

The most surprising result is that with SuperBypass Enabled, the AMD 750 even with its 100MHz memory bus is actually faster than the KX133 using 133MHz Virtual Channel SDRAM.  Here we have another example of VIA’s memory timing issues that have haunted them in the past.  Luckily for VIA, the performance difference between the AMD 750 with SuperBypass enabled and the KX133 isn’t too great. 

The Photoshop test is also quite memory bandwidth dependent and because of that dependency we have the Virtual Channel SDRAM scores taking over the top two spots.  The efficiency of VC-SDRAM helps to boost the scores here, and, although it is not by an enormous amount, it is enough to give the 100MHz VC-SDRAM a slight lead over the 133MHz SDRAM.

With SuperBypass enabled, the AMD 750 with 100MHz SDRAM is as fast as the KX133 with 133MHz SDRAM.  Only when using the currently unavailable Virtual Channel SDRAM can the KX133 jump ahead of the AMD750, but even then by only a small amount.

Once again, we have the AMD 750, with SuperBypass enabled, at the top of the charts, just slightly ahead of the KX133 using 133MHz VC-SDRAM. 

The Virtual Channel memory doesn’t do all that much here because the Netshow Encoder test is much like the Naturally Speaking test where the efficient usage of available memory bandwidth isn’t key to obtaining higher performance because of the lack of enough memory masters accessing the system memory.

With SuperBypass disabled however, the added memory latencies push the AMD 750 slightly behind that of the KX133 with 100MHz SDRAM.