VIA’s KT133A Socket-A Chipset: AMD 760 Performance without DDR SDRAM

Business/Content Creation Performance

SYSMark 2000, as we’ve mentioned time and time again, is a combination of a business and content creation application benchmark however it focuses on stressing performance under one application at a time. 

Here the KT133A is barely any faster than the KT133 in spite of its 133MHz FSB, and the PC2100 DDR SDRAM of the AMD 760 continues to provide a slight advantage of about 4% over the KT133A.

While Ziff Davis Media’s Business Winstone 2001 specifically focuses on business applications, it is clearly more stressing on the FSB simply because of the multitasking nature of the benchmark. 

In this case, the KT133A is 8% faster than the KT133 because of its 133MHz FSB and even more surprising it is only 1.5% slower than the AMD 760 with its PC2100 DDR SDRAM. 

Content Creation Winstone 2001 is more stressful than Business Winstone 2001 simply because of the nature of the benchmarks; we’re not talking about just business applications anymore.  Running applications such as Dreamweaver and Photoshop really put the strain on the FSB and memory bus, which cut the KT133A’s lead down to 6% and also extends the AMD 760’s lead to 4%. 

Is the added cost of the AMD 760 and DDR SDRAM worth the extra 4% performance gain?  You make the decision there but truthfully it’s not worth it.