VIA Apollo Pro 133A with Dual Processors

How We Tested

All of our benchmarks were run under Windows 2000, as obviously, we couldn’t run the tests under Windows 98SE since the OS does not support multiple processors.  For our tests we used the usual suite of benchmarks, Content Creation Winstone 2000, High End Winstone 99, and SPECviewperf.

For our SMP tests we used Ziff Davis’ Dual Processor Inspection tests, which are a part of Winstone 99, Quake III Arena (with SMP enabled) and we also ran Content Creation Winstone 2000 while encoding an MPEG movie to truly stress the need for multiple CPUs. 

For our CCWS 2000 + MPEG movie encoding test we had Windows 2000 & Content Creation Winstone 2000 running on a drive on one IDE channel while the MPEG encoding was taking place on another drive on the second IDE channel.

At the time of testing we did not have any dual BX/GX motherboards available that would run a Coppermine Pentium III which is why we could not include any BX/GX performance numbers in the comparison. At the same time, most dual BX/GX motherboards do not work with Coppermine CPUs, so be sure to check with your motherboard manufacturer before upgrading if you are currently using a dual processor BX/GX board.