LOSTCIRCUITS

The board used in this trial was the FIC KA 6110 and there is no point of looking for this board on FIC’s website because it won’t go into production for a variety of reasons. For anyone not familiar with the VIA 693 chipset, briefly, here is what it is about. The memory is running at either 100 or 133 MHz (BIOS selected) and the AGP speed is 2 x the PCI speed. AGP x 4 is not supported by this chipset. The original drivers proved to be very unstable on this setup, however, with the release of the 5.21 drivers, the stability issues were completely resolved. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

Overclocking the system from 3.5x133MHz (466MHz) to 3.5x140 MHz (490 MHz) gave a nice boost from 110 fps to 117 fps which is very fast for any system below 500 MHz. (G400 was not overclocked)

3Dmark 99 Max

Similarly, the 3Dmark 99 Max numbers are top notch, considering the fact that the Celeron cannot draw upon SSE or 3Dnow! instructions.

Final Reality 1.01

In Final Reality 1.01, once again, the outstanding bus transfer gives the overall score a healty boost. What these scores also show is that the VIA Apollo Pro Plus 133 AGP interface is, at least, closing in on the Intel BX chipset.

Ok, on to the games :-)

Unreal

With the 5.21 driver revision, Unreal (2.25) ran surprisingly smooth and the frame rates are competitive with the Ati Rage 128 Fury, albeit lagging substantially behind the Diamond Viper 770 Ultra (TNT2), both tested on the identical setup.

Unreal Flyby frame rates

Quake II

There is not much to say about QuakeII, except for the one fact that the frame rates achieved on this system were almost as good as those on the Athlon system. There is a good possibility that the different driver revisions play into this result. However, also the limitations of the OpenGL ICD are most likely to impose a performance ceiling that annihilates the extra power of the Athlon platform.

QuakeII demo1 frame rates

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