VIA Apollo KX133 Athlon Chipset - Part 1

With SuperBypass enabled, the AMD 750 chipset jumps to the top here, in spite of its 100MHz memory bus.  Simply disabling SuperBypass (or using a chipset revision without support for the feature) causes a 6% performance drop and quickly puts the 750 at the bottom of the chart. 

The slow gaming performance is classic of VIA chipsets and has been carried over from the 694X which doesn’t perform as well as the Intel BX chipset under gaming situations on a clock for clock basis. 

An even more interesting thing to point out is that the use of VC-SDRAM doesn’t help performance here at all, it actually hurts it.  This could be due to VIA’s VC-SDRAM implementation or possibly timing issues related to using VC-SDRAM on the reference motherboard. 

Here, the performance range isn’t very noticeable.  Because of limitations in the Unreal engine, the 133MHz memory bus doesn’t do anything for performance here.  The only clear outliers are the AMD 750 with SuperBypass enabled and disabled, which take the lead and bring up the rear respectively.

Expendable, a very memory bandwidth dependent game, illustrates a noticeably difference only between the AMD 750 with SuperBypass disabled and the rest of the setups.  The KX133 using 133MHz VC-SDRAM pulls slightly ahead of the KX133 with regular PC133 SDRAM because of the increased efficiency of memory bandwidth utilization with VC-SDRAM, but the performance difference is barely noticeable at best.