New Hope For Athlon - The VIA Apollo KX133 Chipset

Benchmark Results

To get a reasonable idea of KX133's performance I ran BAPCo's new Sysmark2000 under NT as well as Windows98, added some 3D-games for the toy-OS (Win98) and SPECviewperf for NT. I also tried my luck with Windows2000 Professional (build 2195), but so far KX133 and Windows2000 don't really like each other, mainly because there's no VIA-drivers for this upcoming new OS. Windows2k crashed as soon as I tried to install the NVIDIA GeForce drivers.

Sysmark2000 Results Under Windows 98

This new office application benchmark does not show much of a difference between 'Irongate' and KX133. Two points are certainly not a lot. The reason is quite simple though. Office applications don't really depend much on memory performance and they certainly don't care about AGP4x.

Sysmark2000 Results Under Windows NT

The difference between Irongate and KX133 is even less than above. Office applications simply don't care much about those great new features.