Hi!

My system based on PIII 1GHz Coppermine and ABIT VH-20 VIA 694X motherboard (without any tweaks, only BIOS performance defaults)

lafoxxx wrote on 2022-08-31, 08:48:

What makes VIA Apollo better choice? Do people choose it because it has ISA+1.5 GB RAM limit (for people who just can't let ISA go, and think RAM is so important, especially in Win9x) ? Or is it just cheaper?

I think it's rather that it supports 133MHz FSB (and AGP4x) + ISA.

I see most people recommend Intel chipsets for those Intel CPUs. VIA is much more of an Athlon/Duron thing.

lafoxxx wrote on 2022-08-31, 08:48:

I also know a guy who sold VIA-based PC (with Voodoo also, with top Tully-1400, Aureal Vortex and GUS) for ridiculous price of $1000.

The Voodoo, Vortex and GUS alone are the majority of that ridicuolus price. Probably the GUS alone could sell for something like $300 for an impatient collector. Nowdays an $80 Voodoo is considered a cheaper one. Same goes for name brand Vortex cards.

Maybe a very impatient collector or scalper is willing to pay that much to list the valuable/sought after parts for even more ridiculous prices.

First of all, who says go VIA? You write it as if it is a fact or unanimously accepted

VIA has better legacy audio compatibility. The intel chipset doesn't support DDMA and you won't get sound in real dos mode with most pci sound cards, some work but with worse compatibility. And of course no isa. With a 133 mhz bus cpu you can get half the speed at 66 mhz bus and it's not too bad for dos, you can further slow it down with other tools. Also some slowdown tools work better on via. Of course most dos games run on windows and those machines are too fast for old dos games anyway.

Yes, Built a Duron/KT266A system, with PCI YMF sound as per Phil's and I love it! The chipset connection is direct to audio BUS or something, Idon't know, but it works.

I don't think there are many people who actually recommend VIA for P2/P3 CPUs. I surely don't. 😀 For P2/P3 systems, the Intel 440BX is usually the go-to chipset.
I mean, don't get me wrong, if a VIA Apollo board is all you have, then you can certainly do nice things with it as well, however, given the choice between a 440BX and a VIA Apollo based board, I will always go with the former.

There is one area where VIA works better than an Intel chipset: Throttle (useful for DOS gaming/speed sensitive DOS games).
With VIA, not only does the ACPI throttle support 16 speed steps, but it's actually usable up to steps 9 / 10, while on Intel chipsets there are only 8 steps and anything more than step 2 will result in stutters in many games.

I do HIGHLY recommend VIA for Athlon XP / Athlon 64 builds, though, because those later VIA chipsets are fast, very stable and they also retain a lot of legacy features - so you can effectively have one system that plays most games released between 1981 and 2002.

Let me ask a similar question.

Dual p3

Via or intel chipset? Pros/cons?

Oetker wrote on 2022-08-31, 09:04:

lafoxxx wrote on 2022-08-31, 08:48:

What makes VIA Apollo better choice? Do people choose it because it has ISA+1.5 GB RAM limit (for people who just can't let ISA go, and think RAM is so important, especially in Win9x) ? Or is it just cheaper?

I think it's rather that it supports 133MHz FSB (and AGP4x) + ISA.

That. And it was much cheaper and available- both 22 years ago and today.

Thing to understand is that around 1999-2000 Intel was trying to push the market in a direction the market didn't want to go. Intel had chosen high-clock, high-bandwidth, high-latency Rambus RDRAM as the perfect pairing with its deeply pipelined bandwidth-hungry Netburst (P4) architecture. But first they needed there to be an RDRAM ecosystem out there. So during the GHz race, they dropped the i820 chipset as replacement for the i440BX for P3 Coppermine. It had all those nice features BX missed, such as AGP 4x, in-spec 133MHz FSB, ATA-66/100, faster-than-PCI interconnect between north and southbridge. Oh, and it supported RDRAM, not SDRAM.

Three problems:
1) RDRAM's high bandwidth wasn't needed for P3, but it was sensitive to its high latency. So i820 with PC800 RDRAM didn't manage to outperform i440BX with SDRAM.
2) RDRAM was viciously expensive, both due to royalties to Rambus and simply low volume, high cost production. Cost-cutting with PC600 RDRAM was worse: terrible performance and still twice as expensive as SDRAM.
3) Bugs, bugs and more bugs. Google "Caminogate" and "MTH issue".

Consequence: chipset arrived too late, and nobody really trusted it when it did. Meanwhile Via upgraded their awful ApolloPro133 to a quite acceptable ApolloPro133A. It basically offered all the features of the i820, but substituted a (slow) PC133 SDRAM interface instead of RDRAM. PCI performance was bad (and there were compatibility issues with the 686B chipset), there was driver hell with the 4-in-1 drivers (although to be fair, i820 Intel Application Accelerator drivers also took a while to get perfectly stable). But it was available in volume, it wasn't fundamentally flawed and it was cheap. Apart from these two, there were basically no alternatives in consumer space for high-end P3 systems in 2000.

So with a late P3 in 2000 you had four choices:
- stick with i440BX for good price and best performance on same FSB, accept max 100MHz FSB
- stick with i440BX for good price and best performance, attempt to OC your motherboard to 133MHz FSB
- sell a kidney and go for i820 with PC800 RDRAM
- accept a small performance hit (but smaller than PC600 RDRAM or 100MHz FSB) and go for cheap ApolloPro133a.

Unsurprisingly, most people went for the fourth option. So back then far more ApolloPro133A was sold, and that means today boards with that chipset are also the most plentiful. By 2001 there were more options, but by then the high-end crowd was buying Athlon Thunderbirds and P4s, so you don't see many ApolloPro266 or SiS635 boards. You do see quite a few i815 boards, but Intel intentionally limited it so as not to compete with i820 and P4 - in the day no one really cared about the 512MB RAM limit, these days people do. And the lack of ISA is of course of retro relevance, although to be honest, that's just being anachronistic. I can only think of one case in 2001 someone thought he needed ISA (for a Terratec EWS64XL sound card for semi-pro use), and he regretted it due to non-functional Win2k driver support. ISA was not a relevant consideration for most people doing high-end late P3 builds at the time.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-08-31, 11:26:

Let me ask a similar question.

Dual p3

Via or intel chipset? Pros/cons?

Totally different can of worms.

Also: *which* Via or Intel chipset?
i440BX? i820? i840?
Via ApolloPro133D? ApolloPro266?
(and let's not forget ServerWorks IIIHE either)

And what do you want to do with it?

Depending on exactly what you want to run, almost any one of those (well, maybe not 133D or i820) could come out tops.

lafoxxx wrote on 2022-08-31, 08:48:

I just don't get it. Can someone shed some light on this issue please? […]
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I just don't get it. Can someone shed some light on this issue please?

My experience with VIA has been negative so far. It just seems bloated and has noticeable performance issues. That's why I sold VIA-based MoBo for Intel 815E-based one, and have absolutely no regrets (rest of specs remained same). But the dude I sold it to said they would use it with Voodoo5 card.
I also know a guy who sold VIA-based PC (with Voodoo also, with top Tully-1400, Aureal Vortex and GUS) for ridiculous price of $1000.

What makes VIA Apollo better choice? Do people choose it because it has ISA+1.5 GB RAM limit (for people who just can't let ISA go, and think RAM is so important, especially in Win9x) ? Or is it just cheaper?

I mean really, even 440BX has ISA.

I think it was pretty universally recognized that even though on paper some VIA chipsets were better during the PII / PIII era, in practice 440BX was king. Most Intel 440BX chipset-based motherboards were able to run at the out-of-spec FSB speed of 133 MHz and their performance, especially for memory was unrivaled. Throw into the mix the weird quirks and incompatibilities that SiS/VIA chipsets had with certain video- and soundcards and you had a clear winner. The BX-chipset, besides being impressively reliable in fact outperformed the later Intel chipsets too, at least in SD-RAM benchmarks, until DDR support finally arrived and some later video cards started push the AGP 2x bus limits.

So in a word, I wouldn't use a VIA chipset based motherboard in a Pentium II / Pentium III system. I just wouldn't.

On the Athlon-side of the isle, it's different.

dionb wrote on 2022-08-31, 11:40:

Totally different can of worms. […]
Show full quote

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-08-31, 11:26:

Let me ask a similar question.

Dual p3

Via or intel chipset? Pros/cons?

Totally different can of worms.

Also: *which* Via or Intel chipset?
i440BX? i820? i840?
Via ApolloPro133D? ApolloPro266?
(and let's not forget ServerWorks IIIHE either)

And what do you want to do with it?

Depending on exactly what you want to run, almost any one of those (well, maybe not 133D or i820) could come out tops.

Able to rank from best to worst?

Let’s say gaming.

Dual p3 tualitin 512k 1.4ghz

Summary of PIII chipsets:

• early 440BX - noticeable by 3x ISA, 100Mhz FSB, max PIII Katmai 600Mhz, min voltage 1.8V
• mid 440BX - 2x ISA, 100Mhz FSB, max PIII 1Ghz (100 x 10), but PIII 900E is much easier to obtain. FSB up to 133 in BIOS, but not stable.
• late 440BX - 1-2x ISA, 133Mhz FSB stable (up to 150 in BIOS), can run all PIII CPUs
• VIA 693A - avoid, terrible memory performance, about half of what 440BX delivers. Can be fixed via pcredit registry tweaking but this can't be done in DOS.
• VIA694X - decent memory performance, but slightly slower than 440BX at 133Mhz. AGP 4x, support for more memory, Ultra ATA 100.
• VIA 694T - Tualatin capable 694.

Choose one based on cost and your preferences.

AlexZ wrote on 2022-08-31, 17:40:

Summary of PIII chipsets: […]
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Summary of PIII chipsets:

• ***
• VIA694 - decent memory performance, but slightly slower than 440BX at 133Mhz. AGP 4x, support for more memory, Ultra ATA 100.
• VIA 694X - Tualatin capable 694.

Choose one based on cost and your preferences.

Some corrections:
VIA 694X is for Coppermine
VIA 694T is for Tualatin

The only VIA chipset I'd fully recommend over any Intel is the Apollo Pro 266(T). Which--surprise surprise--happens to be the chipset I'm using in my P3 machine! Clock-for-clock, it's faster than any BX board I've tested at 133MHz+ bus speeds. Worth mentioning, however, is that at 100MHz, 440BX is curiously a bit faster. I'm thinking this is because the FSB:DRAM ratio runs asynchronously at FSB100; the QDI Advance 12T motherboard clocks the DDR-SDRAM at 133/266 on a 100MHz FSB. That doesn't really matter, though, as I did not buy this motherboard to run 100MHz FSB CPUs.

The Apollo Pro 266T is the one VIA P3 chipset that, as implemented by QDI, fixes all of the problems 694T and earlier chipsets had.
-AGP 4x is fully stable, even when overclocked.
-Lots of raw memory bandwidth and low memory latency. AIDA64 @ 155MHz FSB reports 1252 MB/s reads, 1186 MB/s writes, and 85.6 ns latency
-Dedicated 266MB/s bus between north and south bridge; doesn't use PCI like 694T and earlier chipsets.
-PCI implementation is fast and stable. Great performance when testing PCI video cards, and no problem at all with an X-Fi.
-Overall, just really, really fast. Puts to shame my Asus TUV4X (Via 694T) at the same clock rates.

Unfortunately, boards based on this chipset are pricey, and the QDI Advance 12T motherboard that I like actually seems to be quite rare. I had to wait years for one to finally appear on ebay after I killed my first one back in 2008.

AlexZ wrote on 2022-08-31, 17:40:

• early 440BX - noticeable by 3x ISA, 100Mhz FSB, max PIII Katmai 600Mhz, min voltage 1.8V

There are some exceptions, like the Gigabyte GA-6BXC rev 2.0, or even cheap and early boards like the Amptron PII-3100B (Jamicon 650B-ATX)

The 6BXC is a great early 440BX board that comes with 3 x ISA slots. I have five of these boards (including two which are rev 1.9) and they all work perfectly at FSB 133 (they all come with the awesome ICS 9148BF-26 clock generator, which can be controlled using software from within DOS or Windows).
The 2.0 revision comes with the HIP6004BCB VRM controller chip (which has a min. output voltage of 1.3V), so it supports Coppermines/VIA C3 Ezra-T / VIA C3 Nehemiah CPUs out of the box.
Earlier revisions like the 1.9 also work fine at FSB 133, but they are equipped with the HIP6004ACB VRM controller, which only supports voltages of 1.8V and higher. However, these can be easily modded/replaced with a HIP6004BCB.

The Amptron PII-3100B also has multiple revisions and it's very similar to the Gigabyte board (also uses either the HIP6004ACB or HIP6004BCB VRM controllers and the ICS 9148BF-26 clock generator). Just like with the Gigabyte GA-6BXC, the HIP6004ACB can be easily replaced with a HIP6004BCB, so Coppermines/VIA C3 CPUs that need lower voltages will work fine after that.

For P2 and P3 am a Intel 440BX fan, was one of the best chipsets for speed + compatibilty + lack of quirks for that era. Sure there are VIA and SIS based but they come with too many issues IMHO....
My CUSL2-C (i815) is OK for a soc370 but as mentioned no ISA and some PCI devices have DMA issues so not good for good DOS stuff, again just MHO....

That remind an old thing : with my old P3 + VIA , under Windows 2000 (and more).
I had to install the VIA chipset drivers >BEFORE< the AGP graphic card.
Else I had crappy lags on games if I did the opposite...

Oh and yeah, I had a better experience with the 815E (more elegant and faster chip).

Roman555 wrote on 2022-08-31, 18:49:

Some corrections:
VIA 694X is for Coppermine
VIA 694T is for Tualatin

Thanks, I fixed it.