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

Business/Content Creation Performance using GeForce2 GTS

As usual, we are starting out with SYSMark 2000 as a tool for evaluation Business/Content Creation application performance in an environment where only a single application is used at a time but it is used heavily.  In our original review of the 730S we criticized its poor performance here as it was over 11% slower than that KT133. 

While we predicted that the KM133 would come out just as fast as the KT133, it turned out to be 5% slower.  We questioned VIA about this and they indicated that because we were using a first revision reference board, the performance was not as high as the ASUS A7V we used as the KT133 test bed for this review.  They indicated that the final revision of the KM133 as found in motherboards that will be shipping very soon will perform identically to the KT133 which makes sense since the two chipsets are virtually identical. 

Remember that in these tests we are only comparing the chipsets using an external AGP 4X graphics accelerator to identify the chipsets’ strengths and weaknesses before evaluating the performance of the solution in an actual value PC. 

Under Business Winstone 2001 the business application tests that are being run have no problem fitting within the Athlon’s large L1/L2 caches (384KB total), making memory performance less of an issue.  In this case, the KM133 even comes out slightly slower than the 730S, but still only 3% slower than the KT133. 

Content Creation Winstone 2001 focuses much more on those applications that are used to generate, view and modify “content” such as HTML (Dreamweaver), images (Photoshop) as well as documents (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc…).  This set of application tests, like Business Winstone 2001 focuses on multitasking performance however these particular tests happen to stress the main memory a little more than those in Business Winstone 2001 resulting in a slight advantage for the KM133 over the 730S. 

You will notice, however, that the performance difference between the KM133 and the 730S is just 2%, which isn’t noticeable at all.  Keep that in mind, as we will definitely call upon that data later in this review.