Slot-1 VIA Motherboard Update

Introduction

This article is meant as update to the original Slot-1 motherboard review , posted in the beginning of April this year. We were reviewing 21 candidates which make use of VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset. I'm sorry that the ABit and Soyo motherboards arrived too late to take part in the initial round up. Both motherboards make use of VIA's 694X North Bridge, which is currently the fastest solution from the taiwanese chip maker.

As Intel wants to replace Slot-1 with the cheaper Socket 370, all Pentium IIIs are now available both as socket and slot versions. Just the Giga-Pentium, which is hardly available now, is merely sold for Slot-1. Recently we posted an article dealing with the Pentium III Coppermine. Please take a look at Performance Guide: Intel Pentium III , just in case you should still not be sure which one to buy.

News And Changes

More and more Socket 370 motherboards are becoming available these days. Of course they will all be taken care of in a special round up, which will follow within the next weeks. Some companies have posted new BIOS versions, which usually fix certain issues of former releases. I'm afraid to say that there are no new BIOS versions for the three candidates that didn't run stable using Windows NT 4. As soon as there will be new BIOSes available, we should be able to see whether the problems are hardware-related or can be solved with a simple BIOS update.