Irongate with Super Bypass vs. VIA Apollo KX133

Introduction

I've promised this 2nd addendum to my initial article 'New Hope for Athlon - VIA's Apollo KX133 Chipset ' last Saturday and I had the results ready for publication by Sunday. The results are far from exciting, which is why I decided to also include information about further findings of the AGP-issue within the GeForce drivers. The testing of the AGP-stuff is not finished yet though, which would have delayed the posting of this article by a bit.

Is Super Bypass The Holy Grail?

I finally decided against waiting until the AGP-testing is finalized and will now simply post the added benchmark data of a Gigabyte GA-7IX-motherboard with enabled 'super bypass '. The reason behind this decision is the high interest into those 'super bypass results' and I appreciate that. I would also appreciate however, if people would understand that 'super bypass' is only a little feature of Irongate and not the Holy Grail. Irongate is logically inferior to KX133 and the facts should really speak for themselves. Irongate lags behind KX133 by 25% in terms of memory bandwidth and pretty much 75% in terms of AGP bandwidth. My AGP-testing has pretty much shown that all graphics cards I've tested only run at AGP1x on Irongate platforms, which seems to be due to instability issues of AMD750 running at AGP2x. This should neither upset nor surprise anybody, because Irongate has never been a particularly mature and highly sophisticated chipset in the first place. Why do you think did it take several months until AMD could get a grip on the 'super bypass'-bug in Irongate-revisions 1-4? 'Super Bypass' was meant to be implemented into Irongate from the very beginning. Why do you think that AMD hoped that KX133 would be ready at Athlon-launch? Because it was known that Irongate was not exactly the most sophisticated chipset for Athlon. Until now it was the only one though.

Now KX133 itself is certainly not the Holy Grail either, as I already pointed out in the initial article. However, most benchmark-data still speaks for KX133 vs. Irongate, as you will see in the following results.