VIA Apollo Pro 133A with Dual Processors

Content Creation Winstone obviously benefits a little bit from having dual processors since the benchmark runs multiple applications at once, however the improvement isn't great. In any case, you can see that the Dual 133A with PC133 SDRAM is just as fast as a Dual 820 board with PC800 RDRAM and it's much cheaper to boot.

As we've noticed before, Virtual Channel 133 SDRAM (VC133) was actually slower than PC133 SDRAM and combined with the inability to use it on motherboards that don't support VC SDRAM we maintain our suggestion that it's not worth the investment. It is very clear that PC133 SDRAM isn't holding the 133A back as it performs very close to the i820 with its more expensive RDRAM.

The i840 obviously comes out on top since it does have dual RDRAM channels at its disposal, at the same time you're going to be paying a much higher premium for it.

Combining CPU intensive MPEG encoding with Content Creation Winstone 2000 proved to be much more than a single processor could handle. As you can see from the graph above, the dual processor scores were generally twice as fast as the single processor scores, showing exactly what kind of a benefit running two CPUs can give you if you're running very CPU intensive tasks.

At the same time, the dual VIA 133A is easily keeping up with the more expensive i820 platform and isn't too far away from the i840. VIA has always been known to produce value chipsets, and now it seems like we have a low cost dual processor setup at our disposal as well.