VIA Apollo Pro 133A & VCSDRAM - Part 2: The Performance

The Motherboard

Micron is proud to say that they are the first manufacturer to be shipping a complete system based on the Intel Pentium III 600B processor. How are they doing this? By using the Apollo Pro 133A as the heart of their system, allowing for them to sell a nicely configured system based on the 600B at under $2000 while being able to boast that they support the 133MHz FSB.

Now, normally when a company like Micron is building a flagship system like their Millennia MAX 600, they go to Intel or another top tier motherboard manufacturer for their motherboard. However, with the unique nature of the MAX 600 (it requires a VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset) they had to look elsewhere. Luckily, Tyan came to the rescue with their Apollo Pro 133A based motherboard, the S1854 Trinity 400.

The Trinity 400 features a total of 6 PCI slots (1 ISA slot optional), 1 AGP 4X slot, and 3 DIMM slots. Tyan wisely chose to integrate real hardware sound on the motherboard with the Creative ES1373 chip. The board features both a Socket-370 and a Slot-1 CPU interface that help it offer a greater range of configuration options in systems, making it ideal for Micron's line of products.

The Trinity 400 also features the elusive standardized front panel LED connector that we're beginning to see on motherboards. This is a definite step forward and we're more than happy to see Tyan supporting it.

The board itself is a final board and we were lucky enough to receive a sample in lab to perform all of our tests on. Unlike i820 motherboards, the S1854 supports the 66MHz FSB frequency courtesy of the Apollo Pro 133A chipset.

The Memory

We used three different memory types in the performance comparison. For the i820 test system we used Samsung PC800 RDRAM. We did not include slower PC700 and PC600 benchmarks simply because we already know the decreased performance these two frequencies offer, illustrated in our review of the i820 chipset.

The i440BX and Apollo Pro 133A test beds used, by default, Samsung PC133 modules equipped with the Samsung 'GA' chips. These chips are fully PC133 compliant; however, they are only rated at 133MHz - CAS 3. Because of this, all memory timings for SDRAM were lowered to 3-3-3.

The Apollo Pro 133A test bed also made use of our NEC Virtual Channel SDRAM rated at 133MHz. Pictures of the modules are featured below:

RDRAM

VC-SDRAM