VIA Apollo KX133 Athlon Chipset - Part 2

Conclusion

The performance of the KX133 hasn't changed much from our reference board supplied by VIA to the shipping boards we've received, including the EPoX 7KXA which we used for the tests in this comparison. This is a good thing, because in the past, motherboard manufacturers have had problems properly implementing VIA chipsets into their designs, generally because they would simply drop a VIA North Bridge into their existing P6 bus designs with very few modifications outside of the bare minimum requirements. Luckily this isn't physically possible with the KX133 chipset, forcing motherboard manufacturers to produce completely original designs based on the VIA reference layout.

The next release of NVIDIA's Detonator drivers for Windows NT will feature the performance enhancements and optimizations that propelled our KX133 test bed to the top of the charts under the SPECviewperf tests. For those of you that own KX133 setups now and need the performance boost immediately, you can easily find the beta drivers online if you search around a bit.

As more KX133 based boards hit the streets, we can hope that the performance will improve as manufacturers begin to tweak the BIOS files more for speed. The only thing there is to be worried about is if motherboard manufacturers decide that promoting their KX133 products isn't worth the potential risks caused by VIA's competitors. If you remember, this was the case with the earliest AMD 750 based motherboards and their manufacturers, while we are expecting things to change with the KX133, there will still be a few frightened manufacturers, let's hope those frightened few don't become the majority this time around.

Be sure to read Part 1 of our KX133 Review for more information on the chipset.