Well I tried using one CPU on the VIA board and there was no difference sadly.

So I thought that Id try getting a modded Tualatin for the Dell board, but eventually found an Intel D815EEA2 board for cheaper , this is essentially the later revision of the Dell board, with a few extras like 4 USB ports at the back , and more importantly, native Tualatin support , it uses the i815E chipset too. This board may have come from a Viglen system of some kind (I assume given thats what greeted me) but thats fine, I just turned off the OEM labels in the BIOS and updated the BIOS accordingly. The only real difference between this and the Dell , is that this is using a 10k SCSI HDD on an Adapter 2100S, but I doubt this would make any real difference to the actual gameplay

The results are very nice overall , Quake3 got 77.4 fps , UT99 got 74.36 , 3DMark01 had a score of 2226. Even Max Payne went up by a pretty surprising 10 frames from 37 to 47 at the same scene (this is at 1024X768 , with everything up to high apart from medium geometry).

One odd thing I found was that WickedGL does not seem to like the i815E , where it actually slows down most games (MDK2 being the exception) , unlike with the VIA chipset , where it can speed up the games by a good few frames

You simply can't go wrong with an intel chipset. For the price via had some nice alternatives but for pure speed/stability/compatibility intel was always the best choice.

Via made some nice chipsets for the athlon xp imho (kt333 and up i really liked) but who knows how fast the athlons would have been with an intel chipset? Fortunately there was an alternative in the exellent form of NV Nforce2, and it was quicker.

VIA is usually slower, but sometimes it's just shoddy motherboards and/or BIOS settings/Drivers that drag performance down. If you want to see the Tualatin go were no Tualatin has ever gone before, I recommend checking out the DDR boards 🤣 .

Someone posted benchmark results on the Doom 3 thread and at 1.6GHz it was actually faster than a Northwood 2.4!

Someone posted benchmark results on the Doom 3 thread and at 1.6GHz it was actually faster than a Northwood 2.4!

Why am I not surprised? 😵

meljor wrote:

Also make sure the board can cache the 1,5gb ram.

Doesn't that only depend on the CPU here?