This motherboard test was a surprisingly pleasant experience, as none of the test candidates showed any of those annoying instabilities that are haunting the reviewer and make reviewing motherboards a sometimes almost endless endeavor.

You may have noticed the memory test boxes on every motherboard evaluation box. We ran a large variety of PC133 SDRAM memory modules on those boards to check for possible compatibility issues. Surprisingly as well as pleasantly enough, none of the test boards had any problem with any of the memory modules.

The three fastest motherboards in this comparison are the Asus A7V133, ABit's KT7A and the Epox 8KTA3. The highest continuity was seen with the Asus A7V133. All other boards keep changing the positions throughout the various benchmarks.

However, the benchmark results alone are not good enough to declare any of these motherboards a winner, particularly if you take into account that the differences in the scores are rather small.

The most important finding was the enjoyable fact that each of the tested boards ran 100% stable even at the fastest possible memory timing settings. VIA's upcoming DDR chipsets may not look too impressive right now, but the Apollo KT133A is a matured, fast and solid product that offers good performance.