Overclocking the FC-PGA Coppermine: Part 2

Historically, VIA has been known for having inferior memory performance when compared to their Intel counterparts. And as the Content Creation Winstone 2000 test shows us here, history does have a tendency to repeat itself.

The first thing you have to understand is that Content Creation Winstone 2000 mimics real world application usage to the point that it's scores should definitely be paid attention to if you have the habit of multitasking which most hard core users do (otherwise, what's the point of all this hardware?). When you are running multiple applications at once, you begin to eat up a considerable amount of memory and being able to access your memory in an efficient manner is directly related to your system's performance in situations like this, which is exactly what CC Winstone 2K reproduces.

As we just mentioned, VIA has never been the best at producing chipsets that could outperform their Intel counterparts in memory performance. For this reason we see the FC-PGA on the BX platform outperform, on a clock for clock basis, the same CPU when used on the Apollo Pro 133A (VIA 694X). Even at 825MHz using the 150MHz FSB setting (thus putting the memory at 150MHz), the FC-PGA on the 694X platform can't beat the 550E running at 733MHz on the good ol' BX platform.