Intel 440BX vs VIA Apollo Pro Chipset Comparison

Our lives are full of choices, what kind of shoes to wear, what kind of food we'll eat, paper or plastic and so on and so forth.  When we have these choices present we often take them for granted, however when one or more of them is taken away from us, we tend to rant and rave until we get them back.  Much like a group of two-year-olds wanting their confiscated toy returned, most hardware enthusiasts wanted their chipset options back when migrating to the Slot-1 platform.   Unfortunately this desire was blatantly denied to us all by none other than Intel who tightly held on to their patent rights for the Slot-1 platform (processors & chipsets), luckily, with bold and dedicated legal teams, two companies have managed to pry open the market from the clenched fists of Intel.  The two companies are none other than Acer Labs Incorporated who is on the verge of releasing their Slot-1 chipset, and more relevant to this article, VIA Technologies, who has just started shipping their Slot-1 chipset, the VIA Apollo Pro.

If the history of computer hardware has taught us nothing, it has at least taught us to never jump blindly on to a moving train...the train in this case being the Apollo Pro chipset.  With Intel's 440BX chipset already proven in the industry, especially with it carrying the support of the largest desktop microprocessor manufacturer on the face of this planet, what reason is there (other than to spite Intel) to pursue a newcomer to the Pentium II chipset market?  Regardless of what many may think, there is a reason. Let's take a look at these two contenders as AnandTech compares the Intel 440BX to the VIA Apollo Pro in this ongoing clash of the titans. 

Dating back to the almost faint memories we all have of the initial battle of the chipsets which most of us experienced during the days of the Socket-7 chipsets, Intel and VIA have seemingly almost always been at each other's throats.  Intel boasted overall acceptance and relatively flawless stability with their 430TX chipset while VIA brought new options of larger cacheable memory areas and official support for non-Intel CPU's with their VP2 chipset.  The basis for most comparisons during those days fell upon the lines of cacheable memory areas as well as performance on non-Intel processor systems, and it that same basis which the comparison between the BX and Apollo Pro chipset cannot be placed upon for obvious reasons.   With Pentium II systems, the cacheable memory area depends entirely upon the processor since the L2 cache is located on the processor card itself, effectively eliminating the first part of that statement, and as far as performance on non-Intel processor systems is concerned, the lack of any non-Intel Slot-1 processors eliminates that clause.  So how do we compare the chipsets?  There's no better place to start than with the chipset specifications.

Chipset Specifications Comparison

Notice any similarities? You should, the two chipsets are virtually identical in terms of features that are normally used for comparison. They both officially support the 100MHz Front Side Bus frequency, as well as other novelties such as the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and SDRAM. One feature unique to the Apollo Pro is its support for FPM DRAM, which was normally thought impossible with the 100MHz FSB...until now. How can FPM DRAM, originally intended to be run at a 66MHz FSB setting, possibly cope with the 100MHz setting on the Apollo Pro chipset? Easily. By allowing for pseudo-synchronous operation of the memory bus, you can lock the frequency of the memory bus to either the FSB clock (100MHz) or the AGP clock (66MHz) much like you can on Super7 boards based upon the VIA MVP3 chipset. This enables you to re-use older PC66 SDRAM or even EDO DRAM that you have laying around, although most mainboard manufacturers will opt to go for the presence of DIMM slots exclusively on their boards, you can still use older EDO DIMMs if you happen to have them. This can decrease system cost considerably if you don't have to purchase faster SDRAM to make use of the higher FSB settings. This also brings the 112, 124, and 133MHz FSB settings within your reach even if you don't have the highest quality SDRAM.

Performance

The Slot-1 Pentium II Test System AnandTech used was configured as follows:

• An Intel Celeron 300A/Pentium II 400 on an ABIT BX6 Motherboard (BX) or an Epox P2-112A Motherboard (Apollo Pro)

• Canopus Spectra 2500 nVidia Riva TNT Video Card (16MB SDRAM)

• 64MB Mushkin SEC PC100 SDRAM

• Western Digital 5.1GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive

• AOpen 32X IDE CD-ROM Drive

• Windows 98 with all of the latest patches/drivers installed and VIA AGP GART v2.6 for all Apollo Pro tests

The benchmark suite consisted of the following applications

• Ziff Davis Winstone 98

• Quake 2 v3.17 using Demo1.dm2 and Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo

• Final Reality 1.01

Business Application Performance

From a performance perspective, the Apollo Pro is on par with the performance of Intel's BX chipset in terms of normal usage and applications.   The performance gap can pretty much be decided by the manufacturer of the motherboard with respect to what measures they take to ensure that the board is the performer it should be. 

No real performance differences between the Epox P2-112A (Apollo Pro) and the ABIT BH6 in terms of business applications, but all work and no play make this life a dull one; Let's take a look at some 3D/AGP tests to put the AGP Bus on these two chipsets to the test.

AGP Performance

The reason a Celeron A was chosen for the tests is because of the versatility of the processor, single handedly it can simulate performance at high end Pentium II levels (i.e. when clocked at 450MHz), low end Pentium II levels (i.e. when clocked at 300MHz) and the lowest possible performance with a Slot-1 processor with L2 cache disabled.

The TNT chipset served as the test video card due to its excellent implementation of the AGP2X specification, therefore showing the best (currently at least) possible throughput over the AGP bus in the Final Reality tests.