You just discovered the reason the BX chipset was so immensely popular way after its "best before" date. When it came out it was the fastes most stable chipset to date and it kept the lead pretty much even over most succeeding intel chipsets.

Via chipsets are significantly better than their reputation, but they never were the faster option, not to speak of reliability. Their advantages were always the increased flexibility and that they were cheaper. They were never faster.

BTW, it is that flexibility, why I actually prefer via chipsets, but they will never be the fastest option.

Seconded. The BX was a speed demon and rock solid stable. It was a shame intel took so long on the 815E and crippled it to make RAMBUS look more appealing. An official 440BX-133 chipset with a 1/2 AGP divider and UltraATA-66 would have been fantastic.

Here's an old Anandtech article from 1999 comparing the 440BX and Apollo Pro 133 (not A) that shows the BX at 100 FSB beating the Apollo Pro at both 100 and 133 FSB settings in a mix of business and gaming benchmarks: https://www.anandtech.com/show/359/9

IIRC, my P3 1GHz coppermine with 100MHz FSB had a better score on my Abit BH6 (i440BX chipset) under 3Dmark 99 than my P3 1GHz with 133MHz FSB on a mobo with VIA chipset

VIA Apollo 133A usually requires some tweaking like bank interleaving for good results. So it's not best performer in DOS.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

VIA Apollo 133A usually requires some tweaking like bank interleaving for good results. So it's not best performer in DOS.

I remember bank interleaving and in order queue depth. Some boards have these options in BIOS but others rely on tools like wpcredit.

Was the 133T better than the 133A? Before I got my DDR-based Tualatin system, I used a TUV4X with the 133T chipset. It wasn't bad at all!

Speed seemed to be right where it should have been. ATA hard drive performance was just fine using XP's built in chipset driver. There was no crackling/popping audio with an SB X-Fi. And it took a hell of a lot more RAM than the BX and 815.

The all important memory performance was A-OK; right up there with i815 at the same bus speed.

133T is actually my go-to chipset for 133MHz Coppermine and Tualatin, it's pretty damn good in my book. As for 100MHz Coppermine and earlier, that's where the BX reigns supreme.

VIA Apollo Pro 266 still would be better, but without ISA or official Tualatin support on desktop boards.