Well, in my opinion, the Via Apollo PIII chipset is quite good. The reason it's not seen as 'desirable' is a mostly undeserved reputation for instability and inferior performance. I think some of their Socket 7 chipsets were a little dodgy, but the PIII chipsets were fine, in my experience.

It's true that there were some stability problems, but I think it was mostly due to a couple bad driver revisions and a few random pieces of add-in hardware that didn't play nice with it. I never personally had a problem with it, though, and many others had experiences similar to mine.

It also takes a bit of tweaking to get the Via Apollo to perform as well as its Intel counterpart. Memory performance was the big thing. However, contrary to popular belief, it can be made to perform nearly as well as the 440BX, provided that the BIOS allows the necessary adjustments to the RAM timings and such. It's not like the VIA is slow, anyhow... we're only talking about a few % lag behind the Intel chipset.

Given the choice, I'd still generally take a 440BX over a Via Apollo, since the 440BX is generally a bit more straightforward 'slap it together and go', but I see no reason not to use a Via board if you have one... it may take a little more effort to get everything 'just right,' but it's really not hard to do.

Lazy me... will just quote myself here:

gerwin wrote:

I have a similar VIA Apollo Pro133A mainboard in a spare system, mine is a Chaintech clone. IIRC Swaaye mentioned quite a few Ap […]
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I have a similar VIA Apollo Pro133A mainboard in a spare system, mine is a Chaintech clone. IIRC Swaaye mentioned quite a few Apollo boards are cheap and unreliable, but mine behaves well, and this Tyan board should also be among the better ones.
In any case the Pro133A is the successor of the normal Pro133, so it's VIA's second try at this Pentium-III chipset. The proper 133MHz bus, AGP-4x and ATA-66 are nice features, that should give it an edge above the legendary intel 440BX mainboards. If it wasn't for the fact that it has only one ISA slot and that it has trouble getting any good benchmarks compared to the 440BX.

This VIA chipset should benefit from tweaking the latency settings.

Like the 440BX you can use adapters to make Tualatin core CPU's work in the Slot-1 or in the socket-370. as shown here: Topic: (im)Possibilities wit Slotket CPU adapters?

Reading Old Thrashbarg's post; yep that sound like a good description of
the thing.
Note that there is also the normal VIA Apollo Pro133 chipset without the A suffix.

As soon as VIA meets USB hell breaks loose.

Pairing a Creative PCI sound card with a VIA chipset from that era is also bad news, because the VIA chipsets had a low tolerance for Creative's lack of PCI standards compliance.

In the system I described earlier I used a SB-128PCI (ensoniq AudioPCI clone) without problems. Later I put in a Vortex-2 card instead, but had a 'sound loss' problem in windows 2000, where it does not give any sound several minutes after startup. On the internet I found a latency patch for this problem which fixed it. I also put in some ISA soundcards for testing, no problems there.
Concerning USB, I only used memory pen-drives, and these worked fine.
Besides that it has a Tualatin P-III-S 1266MHz CPU on an adapter, a Geforce MX440 Videocard and one 512MB DIMM installed.

All seems perfectly functional now, but I do not use the system often.
I am not trying to disprove anything, just writing down what I noticed myself.

Pairing a Creative PCI sound card with a VIA chipset from that era is also bad news, because the VIA chipsets had a low tolerance for Creative's lack of PCI standards compliance.

IMO, pairing a Creative PCI card with anything is bad news. At least the Live! and Audigy and such... the older ES137x-based cards usually work pretty well.

As for USB, yeah, it can be a little flakey sometimes. I haven't had too many problems with it, but some boards are more troublesome than others. Worst case, you could always disable the onboard USB and just add in a PCI card... that would give the opportunity to have USB2.0 anyway.

So it's a "general question about VIA chipsets"--for any processor, isn't it?

I had a socket A ABIT KT7-RAID, 750MHz T-bird Athlon, (with Audigy SB0090 installed) as my main system for a quite a while.. and it was fine. I'd build it again right now if i had the parts.

If you are considering to install more than one ISA card, though, lot of 440BX-based models have the advantage (you can expect 2-3 ISA slots on full-ATX boards) over Apollo 133/A boards. Seems like ISA was being 'phased out' in 1999-2000.

As for legacy support--of the contemporary chipset makers (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, VIA), guess who has the best Win98 support for contemporary CPUs!