VIA KM133 Socket-A Chipset: Final Battle of the Value Chipsets

With the only real variable changed between the theoretical chipset performance benchmarks and the real world system performance benchmarks being the use of the integrated video, there is only one thing we can attribute the poor performance of the KM133 to: 2D performance.

When was the last time that we were ever concerned with 2D performance?  It’s been quite a while indeed, however, one of the worst performers when it came to 2D has been S3.  The Savage4 was horrible and the Savage 2000 did not improve performance to the point where the solution was competitive enough with the rest of the market. 

Is this what’s holding back the KM133?  Let’s have a look at its 2D performance using Winbench 99.

Starting out with some basic business 2D performance tests we see that the 2D performance of the GeForce2 GTS is almost 70% greater than that of the ProSavage graphics core found on the KM133. 

And when compared to the SiS 300 which is the graphics core used in the 730S chipset, the ProSavage is still at least 10% slower. 

The High End graphics tests don’t seem to widen the gap any more between the ProSavage and the GeForce2, however the SiS 300 happens to gain a 20% advantage here. 

This confirms our suspicions that the KM133’s 2D performance is what is holding it back and what is actually allowing the SiS 730S to outperform it, in spite of the results of the first set of theoretical benchmarks we took you all through.