Linux Pentium III Chipset Comparison

Conclusions

Benchmarking under Linux, there are several other factors to consider when looking at these figures. First, these benchmarks are often not as well developed as their Windows counterparts, which means that the figures may not be the most optimal figures possible. Further, the general lack of information surrounding NVIDIA's drivers limits our ability to interpret results as being chipset related or driver related (lack of support, for example).

In general, it is pretty safe to say that the two Intel chipsets outperformed the VIA in all tests except for Disk Throughput, in which the BX lost due to it's age and lack of an ATA/66 or ATA/100 controller. It is amazing in itself that the BX chipset still exists, and even more so, that it can compete very well with such more modern chipsets. That is a major testament to it's design. If you have no need for ATA/100, AGP 4X or a 133MHz bus with standard speed AGP bus, the BX could be a good chipset to consider. However, most people would prefer the 815's ability to maintain a standard AGP bus speed while providing support for the more modern AGP 4X and ATA/100 standards.

Finally, there is stability to consider. The only problem we noticed was with AGP 4X support on the VIA Apollo Pro 133A. While we didn't notice any other lockups during our testing, Linux 3D drivers are often blamed for instability due to chipset bugs that have yet to be found or addressed in kernel abstractions. It is possible that this or a related lockup could happen in other situations. It is also possible that it was simply due to faulty VIA AGP 4X support in either the kernel or NVIDIA's drivers.

Also note that we noticed relatively poor memory and agp performance using the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset Windows as well, as reported in this article. This helps supports the claim that the chipset is just not as fast as either Intel chipsets, as separate benchmarks under completely different operating systems both favored the Intel chipsets.

We would have to pick the Intel 815 chipset as the best choice for the Linux user with a Pentium-III at the moment. However, that comes with the warning that one must use a modern kernel to get proper AGP support for this kernel without using the onboard video. That may scare some of the not-so-advanced Linux users away, at least until the distributions start shipping 2.4 kernels, probably sometime early next year. That is, of course, assuming that 2.4.0 gets released sometime in the near future.

Links of Interest:

• Intel 440BX 133MHz Motherboard Roundup (June 2000)
• VIA Apollo Pro 133A & VCSDRAM - Part 2: The Performance
• Linux Video Card Comparison
• SPEC, makers of SPECviewperf
• Bonnie, a disk benchmark
• Nbench, a system performance benchmark