When it doubt run Sisoft Sandra memory benchmark. Unusually low memory performance could be behind poor game performance. My Sisoft Sandra 2003 memory score is 810 / 825. CL2 SDRAM at 112Mhz.

My 440BX PIII 840Mhz (7.5x112, CL2 memory) scores 6482 points in 3dmark 99 at 640x480 16bit and 6366 at 1024x768 32bit (obviously CPU bottleneck), which is not that great but good enough for me. With PIII 600 it was 4800 points. Unfortunately I do not have 3dmark 2000. I didn't try to find the fastest drivers yet.

I have a few spare 440BX boards but no Via 694X boards because of their subpar memory performance.

What are the detailed 3DMark scores?

Did you try the VIA Memory Interleave Enabler utility? Sometimes this makes a large impact on memory performance.

I installed 3dmark 2000 and 2001, here are my results:

3dmark 2000 - 5824 (640x480 16bit), 5974 (1024x768 32bit)
3dmark 2001 - 5554 (640x480 16bit), 5016 (1024x768 32bit)

3dmark 2001 benefits a lot from HW T&L supported by Nvidia FX graphics cards. I use 81.98 driver as I found no performance difference compared to 45.23.

Eep386 wrote on 2022-02-14, 21:53:

Did you try the VIA Memory Interleave Enabler utility? Sometimes this makes a large impact on memory performance.

this ended up making ALL the difference. i didn't even know about this utility. thanks a bunch!

AlexZ wrote on 2022-02-14, 19:25:

When it doubt run Sisoft Sandra memory benchmark.

downloaded Sandra 2001 since i couldn't find 03 and got 168/172Mb/s before the fix and 358/451 Mb/s after the interweave enabler. much better!

getting 3035 in 3dmark01
and 5900 in 3dmark00
101fps in 1024x768-32 quake 3 111fps in 16bpp
the os feels a lot snappier as well. makes me wonder why they even sold these boards without memory interweaving enabled in the first place. might as well have been running pc66 memory beforehand.
thanks a bunch for the help guys! i couldn't have imagined this chipset being as finicky as it is. if the issue ended up being memory interweaving, is there a way to enable it without the driver? for oses like 0s/2 or dos?

AlexZ wrote on 2022-02-16, 18:46:

I installed 3dmark 2000 and 2001, here are my results: […]
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I installed 3dmark 2000 and 2001, here are my results:

3dmark 2000 - 5824 (640x480 16bit), 5974 (1024x768 32bit)
3dmark 2001 - 5554 (640x480 16bit), 5016 (1024x768 32bit)

3dmark 2001 benefits a lot from HW T&L supported by Nvidia FX graphics cards. I use 81.98 driver as I found no performance difference compared to 45.23.

hell ye beefcake machine.
do you have any problems with an fx card in a p3? always thought of throwing something newer like a 5600 or an ati 9700 in mine.

To have memory interleave without the patch you'd have to modify the BIOS. Take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQM4e7AwI0U

Now your memory score looks alright for MMX version of the benchmark. Sisoft Sandra 2003 also has SSE version of it, that's why my score is higher. A tuned VIA 693/694X with PC133 memory is about as fast as 440BX with PC100 memory. But the problem is you can enable memory interleave in Windows only. DOS performance will still be poor. This is why 694X is not the best choice for PIII rigs.

There is no performance benefit in having Nvidia FX for DirectX 7.0 games as you see our 3dmark 2000 score is about the same. My score is not very sensitive to resolution and bit depth as CPU is the bottleneck. I could play at 1600x1200 32bit color depth. In 3d mark 2001 there is a clear difference. If you intend to play games that use DirectX 8.1 then you would benefit from Nvidia FX graphics card.

I have no problems with my GeForce FX. Nvidia graphics cards are more compatible in DOS than ATI. I wouldn't go with ATI for a DOS machine.

AlexZ wrote on 2022-02-16, 20:17:

Now your memory score looks alright for MMX version of the benchmark. Sisoft Sandra 2003 also has SSE version of it, that's why my score is higher. A tuned VIA 693/694X with PC133 memory is about as fast as 440BX with PC100 memory. But the problem is you can enable memory interleave in Windows only. DOS performance will still be poor. This is why 694X is not the best choice for PIII rigs.

There is no performance benefit in having Nvidia FX for DirectX 7.0 games as you see our 3dmark 2000 score is about the same. My score is not very sensitive to resolution and bit depth as CPU is the bottleneck. I could play at 1600x1200 32bit color depth. In 3d mark 2001 there is a clear difference. If you intend to play games that use DirectX 8.1 then you would benefit from Nvidia FX graphics card.

I have no problems with my GeForce FX. Nvidia graphics cards are more compatible in DOS than ATI. I wouldn't go with ATI for a DOS machine.

Good to know! I think the only other socket 370 board i have is an i815 from an hp vectra. Might be worthwhile to upgrade to it even if it is an OEM board.
Do you happen to know where i can find sandra 03?

You're welcome.
George Breese's utilities are a godsend for VIA motherboards. He also made a PCI Latency patch that supposedly fixes stuttering sound and PCI SCSI performance problems with VIA based motherboards.

Y2KBazo wrote on 2022-02-16, 19:02:

makes me wonder why they even sold these boards without memory interweaving enabled in the first place. might as well have been running pc66 memory beforehand.

VIA was always a budget option with one exception of AMD Socket A platform, when it became "first rate" out of necessity (AMD chipsets being hot garbage).

I'm gonna have to test this on my Slot1 Apollo Pro board, its getting an amazing 241mb/s on PC100 ram with my Pentium III 500 in Aida64, it's saying that a Pentium MMX with PC66 is outdoing it

So on my Budget Retro System I got these results with the patch, it seems it can help when your not GPU bound, otherwise it makes no diffrence

1033mb/s read/1037mb/s write on my Asus CUV4x (VIA Apollo Pro133A) with Pentium III 800E and without a patch, tested in Everest 4.60.1500.