Reinforcements: 6 New Athlon Boards With VIA's KT133A

Quake III Arena - Timedemo 001

There was a little surprise under Quake III Arena. This time AOpen achieved the number one ranking, followed by ABit, Asus and IWill. The performance differences between the best (AOpen) and the slowest (MSI) board are tremendous this time. 156 vs 143 fps are usually two CPU speed bins.

In the past months, most motherboard reviews used to place their focus on features. Now it seems like performance is going to be an issue again. First I did not want to believe those results, hence I repeated the benchmark several times on most of the boards to be absolutely sure.

SPECviewperf 6.1.2: Advanced Visualizer

Again on the top: Asus, AOpen and IWill. This time, Epox is able to score position #2. The differences between the candidates are quite big here as well.