VIA Apollo Pro 133/133A Motherboard Roundup - February 2000

Conclusion

The best overall motherboard in this roundup goes to Gigabyte for their GA-6VX-4X which is the Slot-1 counterpart of their GA-6VX7-4X. While they both performed similarly and were just as stable as one another, the 6VX-4X gets the Editor's Choice award here because of the flexibility offered by the Slot-1 interface. The 6VX7-4X offers no adjustable voltage settings, neither does the 6VX-4X, but with the 6VX-4X you can use a Socket-370 to Slot-1 adapter with your FC-PGA Pentium III and gain control over the voltage supplied to your CPU.

The ASUS P3V4X is another potentially powerful candidate for the Editor's Choice if ASUS could just improve the performance of the board. The issue seems to be related to a BIOS setting that isn't present in the setup of the P3V4X so it shouldn't be too difficult for ASUS to correct, only time will tell if ASUS takes care of this issue.

The performance issue is present with virtually all of the motherboards in this roundup, and it is a very disappointing scene. It has been just about two years since the last time we did a major motherboard comparison where there was a significant difference in performance among the entries. The VIA Apollo Pro 133/133A chipsets are viable alternatives, and although there are quite a few motherboard manufacturers out there that are using the solutions we're going to need a greater level of perfection from these manufacturers before the platform can get to the point the BX platform is today where you can go out and pick up virtually any board without having to worry about performance issues.

If motherboard manufacturers don't take it upon themselves to fix the problems with their boards, VIA needs to step forward and endorse only those manufacturers that properly implement their chipsets as well as follow a set of guidelines for performance and stability when using these chipsets. From the manufacturers that we've talked to, we've received the impression that VIA isn't nearly as cooperative as Intel with helping motherboard manufacturers with their designs. While this may be an illustration of the capabilities of a large company versus a smaller one, it is also a sign that VIA does need to do more if the problem's roots is indeed with them and not lax motherboard manufacturers.

Once again, kudos to the manufacturers such as Gigabyte, Tyan and Elitegroup that actually took the time to properly implement and tweak their Apollo Pro 133 and 133A boards. To the rest, we will be doing another roundup in a few weeks time, let's hope the picture changes by then.