VIA Apollo Pro 133A Motherboard Roundup - July 2000

Tweaking the Apollo Pro 133A

One of our favorite utility writers, H. Oda, is back again to help out with Apollo Pro 133A tweaking. His WPCREDIT and WPCRSET allow you to directly edit the registers of the chipset, enabling or disabling features that your motherboard manufacturer may or may not have enabled or disabled. It doesn't matter if your board doesn't have a particular setting in the BIOS, you can change it with these two utilities. Whether it be CAS latency timing or memory interleaving, just about anything relating to chipset features can be changed here.

To illustrate the power of WPCREDIT and WPCRSET, we took the slowest board in this roundup (although not by much) and tweaked it with these programs. We were able to match or beat the performance of the fastest board in nearly every benchmark we ran, including Quake 3 where the performance difference was at its largest. We were also able to tweak a few extra percentage points out of the fastest board as well.

Clearly the difference in performance here lies in the optimizations that motherboard manufacturers have chosen to make, and some have chosen slower performance in favor of increased stability.

Be warned, however, that they are not the most user friendly of utilities as you'll be directly editing the registers of the chipset, but they are definitely very powerful. If you're not sure you know what you're doing and you don't understand the concept of registers and hexadecimal/binary numbers, we wouldn't recommend that you play around with WPCREDIT and WPCRSET. Fortunately, you can do no permanent damage to your board or anything in your system with these particular utilities. If you screw up, the system may lock up or become unstable, but you can simply reboot to restore the original values.