Socket-A VIA KT133 Motherboard Roundup - November 2000

Upgraded Performance for Free

Among the twelve motherboards in this roundup, some of them are over three months old, while others arrived at our West Coast labs within the past three weeks.  It is not entirely fair to just blindly run benchmarks on them for comparison.  During these three months, manufacturers could have made some revisions to their board for better performance, improved stability, as well as to solve compatibility issues. 

Usually that is done in one of three ways: new board revisions, BIOS revisions, and driver revisions.  For a new board revision, it is not always possible for us to obtain the most updated board revision from the manufacturers, so all we could do is to see if there are any major issues with the revision we are testing.  For drivers we simply use VIA’s reference drivers, which we recommend that all of you do, thus eliminating this as an issue.

However there is definitely something we can do when it comes to newer BIOS revisions.  Therefore we took all of the boards and made sure to update their BIOSes to provide for a truly fair comparison. 

It was then no big surprise to us when we noticed that the BIOS updates did improve performance.  We decided to put these results in separate tables, organized by motherboard, so that you can see how upgrading the BIOS can possibly help improve performance.