VIA KT333 Put To The Test: 18 Motherboards Compared

Benchmarks Under Windows 2000

We wanted to avoid the automatic resource management feature integrated in Windows XP, so as in the past, we opted to use Windows 2000 to test this group of chipsets. The only reason for choosing Windows 2000 over Windows XP is that the newer version of Windows optimizes how background applications run. This new feature would have prevented us from obtaining accurate benchmarking results.

We performed a total of 21 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how the new VIA KT333 chipset performs. You can get a clear overall picture from the benchmark results for a total of 3 different platforms, all of which are for AMD CPUs. We ran four different Quake 3 tests to determine OpenGL performance. The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment - the Lame MP3 Encoder was used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. Still a classic, our MPEG-4 test converts a file from a commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Xmpeg 4.5 and the DivX 5.01 codec. We also created an MPEG-2 film using the video-editing software "Pinnacle Studio 7." A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Newtek's Lightwave (version 7b). We also ran the new WinACE 2.11 to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. The Sysmark 2002 benchmark was used to determine office performance. The SPECviewperf benchmark offered a comprehensive 3D benchmark suite. PC Mark 2002 was used to measure CPU and multimedia performance.

CPU Clock Speeds: Comparison Of 18 Boards