VIA P4X266 Motherboard Roundup - The Forbidden Five - January 2002

Overall Performance SYSMark 2001 VIA P4XB-SA ECS P4VXAD Azza P4X2-AV ACorp 4VPX266A Tyan Trinity 510 Shuttle AV40/R 189 182 181 180 180 178 | 0 | 38 | 76 | 113 | 151 | 189 | 227

Although the theoretical numbers indicated a much larger performance gap, it's clear by these performance figures that the P4X266A North Bridge doesn't offer all that much more. The less than 4% lead the P4XB-SA holds over the ECS P4VXAD would never be seen by an end user which may be why most manufacturers have not adopted the new North Bridge into their P4X266 designs right away.

Most of the boards perform within a 2% margin of one another making the performance argument one of little merit.

Overall Performance Return to Castle Wolfenstein (1024 x 768 x 32 - High Quality) VIA P4XB-SA ECS P4VXAD Azza P4X2-AV ACorp 4VPX266A Shuttle AV40/R Tyan Trinity 510 146.2 138.4 137.7 136.5 135.6 130.1 | 0 | 29 | 58 | 88 | 117 | 146 | 175

The performance standings are virtually identical under RtCW with the exception of the last place Tyan Trinity 510. Games tend to be much more dependent on memory performance and thus can show off otherwise unnoticeable differences in memory timing sacrifices.

Here we confirm our earlier suspicions that the Trinity 510 may have lower memory performance than the competing solutions in order to offer a 4 DIMM slots. For those that will populate all of the DIMM slots this isn't a major sacrifice at all, but those that won't use the extra slots would be better off considering the VIA or ECS solutions.