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

Final Words

Although the KM133 did meet our very high expectations in a theoretical sense, where it failed was where it most needed to succeed, in the real world tests.

Offering the same memory performance as the KT133 chipset, the KM133 chipset was set to be an instant success when its closest competitor was the SiS 730S. However, VIA's recent marriage to S3 left the KM133 with one of the slowest 2D graphics in the industry, in spite of using the newer Savage 2000 as the basis for its 2D core. This combined with the poor driver support that we have seen surrounding the Savage4 and Savage 2000 solutions from back when they were standalone graphics chips make the KM133 not as desirable as we originally hoped it would be.

In this case, the SiS 730S becomes much more appetizing than when we originally considered it. With all the cards on the table, it seems like SiS holds the better hand. With superior DVD and 2D performance as well as superior disk performance (under Windows 98SE for now), the resulting overall performance of the 730S is between 0 and 10% greater than the KM133. Factor in the driver maturity of the SiS 300 graphics core and you have a much better solution from SiS than what VIA is presenting with the KM133.

Can VIA turn things around? It is possible, however quite a bit of attention must be devoted to driver support for the ProSavage line of chipsets and they must invest a considerable portion of that attention to searching for 2D performance optimizations for the Savage 2000 2D core present in the KM133.

If you have to choose between VIA's KM133 and SiS' 730S, the better choice definitely lies with SiS. While the performance of the 730S isn't as high as we would like it to be, it's the best that is currently available in its price class whereas there are situations in which the KM133 with a Duron 800 is even slower than a Celeron 766 on an i815.

As far as the future goes, SiS will be releasing an updated version of their 730S, called the 740 by Q4-2001 which will boast DDR SDRAM support. And VIA will be releasing another UMA solution for the Socket-A platform later in 2001 with integrated Trident Blade 3D graphics instead of the ProSavage core.

Is there any other hope for the value Socket-A platform? Unfortunately it doesn't seem so. ALi won't be releasing any UMA chipsets for the Socket-A platform in 2001, at least not according to their roadmap. Instead, ALi will continue to use the Aladdin 7 as their UMA platform of choice for value PCs which, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, is a Super7 chipset for Socket-7 processors.

There you have it folks, the two UMA solutions for the Duron have been presented to you in their entirety. Now it's up to AMD to keep prices on the Duron low and the performance competitive, and let's watch the value PC market segment get competitive once again.