VIA KM133 Socket-A Chipset: Final Battle of the Value Chipsets

Evaluating the Platform

We are conducting this review of the KM133 in the same manner as we did our SiS 730S Review, splitting up the benchmarks into two separate test sections. A full description of the procedure is provided below:

Obviously if we simply benchmarked the KM133 in the same manner that we have done all of our other Athlon chipset reviews, it wouldn’t be too useful of a comparison.  Realistically speaking, no one is going to purchase a KM133-based system with a 1.2GHz Athlon and 256MB of SDRAM.  However, without doing a comparison with the fastest processor and a decent amount of memory, we can’t fairly evaluate the KM133 as a chipset alone without introducing potential bottlenecks created by using a slower CPU and/or less memory.  So we ran two sets of benchmarks designed to evaluate the VIA KM133 as: 1) a chipset and 2) as a platform solution for the Duron processor.

The first set of benchmarks follow our usual chipset review format: they pit the KM133 against the KT133 and the ALi MAGiK1 chipsets to show any strengths/weaknesses of the chipset itself.  In these tests we use the external AGP 4X slot to house our test bench GeForce2 GTS in order to eliminate any sort of bottlenecks that may be caused by the chipset’s integrated video.

The second set of benchmarks is designed to place the KM133 in the type of system configuration you can reasonably expect to see it used in.  We make use of a Duron 800, 128MB PC133 SDRAM as well as its integrated ProSavage video core instead of our own GeForce2 GTS.  In this section, the system is compared to an identically configured system using the KT133 chipset and a NVIDIA RivaTNT2 M64 video card (which is commonly found in the lower priced Athlon/Duron systems) as well as a Celeron 766 system using an i810E motherboard and not to mention the KM133's direct competitor, the SiS 730S. 

So if you’re interested in seeing the chipset compared to other Athlon chipsets, take a look at the first set of benchmarks, otherwise skip ahead to the second set. 

The Chipset Test