New Hope For Athlon - The VIA Apollo KX133 Chipset

3D-Game Performance In Depth

To find out what makes KX133 faster in 3D-games, I played a bit with the BIOS-setup. I thought it would be interesting to find out if the 133 MHz memory-bus or the AGP4x are responsible for the higher scores. I also wanted to see how much the impact of CAS-delay of 2 vs. a CAS-delay of 3 clocks would be.

These results are very interesting. The main secret behind the performance-advantage of KX133 vs. Irongate seems to be PC133. The scores are highly depending on the memory-bandwidth, as you can even see if you compare the 133 MHz setting with CAS2 to the one with CAS3. KX133 scores almost identical to Irongate once it runs at 100 MHz memory clock. AGP4x vs. AGP2x vs. AGP1x is hardly making any difference. So far about the good old AGP-hype.