VIA Apollo Pro 133A Motherboard Roundup - July 2000

Gaming Performance

We begin to see a little more variation in performance under Quake 3 at 640x480x16. The AOpen boards fall noticeably behind, while only the ASUS P3V4X pulls slightly ahead. The difference is still only a few percent though.

Using H.Oda's VIA Chipset Tweaking Tools, we were able to get the performance of the AOpen boards above that of the stock ASUS P3V4X and could even tweak a few more fps out of the leading P3V4X. We only recommend the H-Oda tools for the more adventurous tweakers out there, however.

The GeForce SDR is clearly the limiting factor when we hit resolutions this high. It is nevertheless interesting to see a clear divide among the boards, however small it maybe.

Note that the Gainward 6VBA-133A was not able to complete any gaming benchmarks.