Hey all,

I always knew the 440BX is an excellent chipset however I’ve been curious to see just how much faster it was compared to SiS and VIA's initial offerings. I had some time so decided to try and find out. Results aren’t too surprising but some interesting things can be concluded from my small sample size of boards. A Pentium II 450Mhz was used for all benchmarks. I know there are later Via chipsets but I was curious to see how the first round a chipsets compared from 1998

Motherboards:
-Chaintech 6BTML representing Intels 440BX
-Superpower SP-6XS and Chaintech 6SSA2 representing SiS 5600
-Gigabyte GA-6VX representing VIAs Apollo pro

Video Cards:
-Asus V3800U Nvidia TNT2 Ultra,
-STB voodoo 3 2000 AGP,
-2 x STB black magic Voodoo 2 12mb

-Drivers: All benchmarks 800x600, Glide used for 3dfx benchmarks where available, Via 4.35 chipset, Sis v1.0 chipsets. Asus 6.31c V3800U for TNT2, Voodoo 3 4.12.01.0666 and Voodoo 2 FastVoodoo2 4.6, no sound card

Conclusions
-440BX has superior performance especially the AGP implementation.
-Using a 3dfx AGP card all chipset performance is arguably acceptable but drops off when using an Nvidia card especially with direct 3d for some reason
-The VIAs AGP implementation appears faster than the SIS chipset however the SIS PCI implementation seems to be faster so performed better than the VIA with voodoo 2’s.
-Motherboard implementation of chipset can make a huge difference, The 2 SiS boards benchmark discrepancy is huge. The Chaintech board is far slower and has far less options in bios to tweak. Speedsys memory bandwidth is also majorly lower. Unfortunately I only had time to benchmark voodoo 2's with the Chintech sis 5600 but from memory the AGP performance with a voodoo 3 was very similar to the voodoo 2 sli - abysmal

Interesting notes
-The Sis 5600 has the IDE controller integrated into the north bridge in contrast with the 440BX and Apollo pro being contained in the south bridge
-I’ve been using the SiS board with Voodoo 2’s for a couple of months now and found its been quite stable and performance using the pci voodoo 2’s is only marginally slower than the 440BX
-There is a slot 1 ALI chipset which is scarce and performance isn't well documented, wonder how it performs