The Three Musketeers: Athlon Platforms For 133 MHz FSB

Benchmarks

Sysmark2000 / Windows 98

The MSI K7 Master is the clear winner of this benchmark, showing that AMD760 plus DDR-SDRAM is currently the fastest Athlon platform available. Obviously the A7V running Athlon at only 100 MHz FSB is the worst performer, but you can see that even office applications are able to benefit from the 133 MHz FSB even if normal SDRAM is used, since the A7V133 is clearly faster than its older brother. The Iwill KA266 with ALi's MaGiK1 chipset cannot convince in this test. Although it is using DDR-SDRAM it is hardly faster than the A7V133 with normal SDRAM. It is also lagging quite a bit behind the K7 Master with AMD760 chipset.

Quake 3 Arena / Windows 98

In the memory and processor bus intensive 3D game Quake 3 Arena Iwill's KA266 with ALi's MaGiK1 chipset and DDR-SDRAM is able to pull away from the A7V133 with VIA's KT133A and SDRAM. However, the K7 Master with AMD760 and DDR-SDRAM is still the clear leader. Once more it seems obvious that ALi's MaGiK1 chipset cannot really take proper advantage of DDR-SDRAM.