April 9, 2000

There is certainly no need to introduce ASUS, the world’s largest OEM mainboard manufacturer. It is further no longer necessary to waste bandwidth on the intricacies of the VIA KX133 chipset. Along these lines, it is only of dubious value to reiterate the performance comparisons between the AMD Irongate and the VIA KX133 chipsets. Time has passed and the improvements in the drivers have done the rest to dispel the initial doubts about the performance of the latest Slot A chipset.

As mentioned in the earlier review of the EpoX 7KXA, there are several ways of approaching the KX 133 market. There is the somewhat rushed release of the EpoX board (a good quality board nonetheless) and there are numerous more conservative ways taken by other manufacturers, trying to weed out every bug and debut with a perfect product. Somewhere in between is the ASUS way of doing things, lagging slightly behind EpoX but still beating most of the competition regarding the release.

One must not forget that pushing not just one but actually two new Athlon boards on the market is, among other things, a political tightrope act. Still, after playing cloak and dagger with chipzilla, and streamlining the Slot1 mainboard production to include the P3V4X it appears that ASUS has finally enough self confidence to openly convert to VIA and, by extension, to the KX133 platform. If the AMD Irongate based ASUS K7M already had the recognition of being one of the top boards in the SlotA arena, the next logical step had to be the implementation of the new VIA chipset.

A certain amount of experience with the VIA 694X North Bridge certainly didn’t hurt. Particularly some problems with the latest revision of the VIA 4-in-1 drivers (4.20) may have pointed towards some additional soft spots between hardware and drivers, giving ASUS a chance for further debugging / substituting earlier driver components and getting the performance up to standards.

All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws. Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this site.
Copyright 2000 LostCircuits