VIA KT133A Motherboard Roundup - June 2001

How and What to Compare

Now that we have looked at the eleven boards individually, we have to find a way to compare them from as many perspectives as possible. Performance is definitely a factor, although not a huge one since the variation among boards is only a few percentage points. Many of these boards were reviewed back in early January, and since then a variety of new BIOS revisions have been released which could affect performance noticeably. So, we gathered up the most recent BIOS updates from all the manufacturers and retested the performance to ensure the comparison between the boards is fair.

Next, prices have certainly changed since those initial reviews and this comparison offers an opportunity to look at a snapshot of prices that will give us a fair comparison. However, keep in mind a few things. First of all, these prices are by no means the cheapest you can find out there, but are meant to represent typical prices that you can find relatively easily.

Of course, don't forget that picking any product solely on price is probably not a good idea. Each board has a different set of features, performance, stability, overclocking ability, and quality, so a more expensive board that delivers more features that are useful to you may actually be a better buy for you. Thus, it is critical that you find the right balance between price and features that meets your needs.

We will also include a table showing the results of our stability tests, given in number of crashes within a 24-hour period of stress testing. As we have stressed several times before, our stability tests put much more stress on the system than any single user ever could manage. Thus, when we say a board crashed X times in 24 hours, that does not translate into the board will crash for you X times everyday. It does, however, provide a good tool for comparing the stability of different boards.