For the longest time, running dual processors has been reserved for the high end and workstation systems, which also happen to be very expensive computers.  Our perception of dual processor systems changed considerably when it was discovered that the first Celeron’s CPUs could be modified to run in SMP mode.  Cashing in on this opportunity to make a truly unique product, ABIT released the BP6, the first dual processor board that ever hit the market with dual Socket-370 interfaces. 

The beauty of the BP6 was that you could go out and pick up the board for under $200 as well as a pair of Celeron 300A’s that would almost definitely run at 450MHz for about $100 per chip and even less as time went on.  In the end, for a little more than what a normal single processor BX setup would set you back, you could have a fairly powerful dual processor setup.

Since the release of the BP6 back in the summer of 1999, there haven’t been any products quite like ABIT’s only dual processor solution, mainly because the older Celerons have come and gone and the newer ones aren’t SMP friendly.  Part of the attractiveness of the BP6 was that the CPUs that you could use with it were so cheap and very easy to overclock; now that the older Celeron is gone, it is difficult for anything to be quite as appealing as the BP6 was. 

Let’s fast forward a bit to last year’s Fall Comdex in Las Vegas.  Tyan gave us an interesting bit of information on a product they were working on.  They let us know that the 694X North Bridge of the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset, a chipset we’d been playing around with for quite some time, features integrated SMP support.  While the BX and GX chipsets also boast SMP support in order to enable it a motherboard manufacturer must include an external ASIC on the board itself in order to take advantage of the two processors.

Tyan saw this feature of the 694X North Bridge as an opportunity to take one of their specialties, producing dual processor workstation motherboards, and decrease the end cost by a decent amount.  The first dual Slot-1 motherboard based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133A Chipset was born and dubbed the Tyan Tiger 133. 

Last November, Tyan was busy ironing out some issues they were having with their Tiger 133 design, and early in 2000 we received a sample of the board; unfortunately, the board was far from stable.  Later we received another revision of the Tiger 133, but once again it wasn’t stable enough to complete our usual suite of benchmarks. 

But instead of Tyan being the first to get us a fully working sample, we were actually courted by another company that happened to have a similar solution that we saw at this year’s Computex in Taipei. 

Dual VIA 133A at Computex 2000

At Computex 2000 we ran into a handful of dual Socket-370 motherboards based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset, among those are what we have pictured below:

ABIT VP-20

AOpen DX34 Plus

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Gigabyte GA-6VXD7

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Microstar 694D Pro

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Microstar’s 694D Pro

Microstar was actually the first to get us their dual Socket-370 board based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset, the 694D Pro.  The board itself is very well-designed, it features 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot and 1 CNR slot that can only accept Audio/Modem cards (the 686A South Bridge does not have an integrated networking controller). 

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In addition to the usual slot layout and its 4 DIMMs, it also features an on-board Promise ATA 100 controller with IDE RAID support. 

As if that weren’t enough, the board also features an optional Texas Instruments IEEE 1394 (a.k.a. Firewire controller) as well. The only problem with this implementation, as you can see below, is that it is a two chip solution which increases the cost of the motherboard by a noticeable amount.

Most motherboard manufacturers are waiting for a single chip solution before integrating Firewire on their boards.

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The BIOS of the board is also pretty flexible, it supports independent clock multipliers and voltages for each one of the installed CPUs.  While the independent clock multipliers won’t help you much since all Intel CPUs are clock locked, the independent voltages can come in handy if you are trying to overclock your CPUs and one needs a bit more voltage than the other in order to reach the overclocked speed. 

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The 694D Pro supports quite a few FSB settings, some of which are pretty high as you can see from the above graph. The supported FSB frequencies are: 66 / 75 / 79 / 83 / 90 / 95 / 100 / 110 / 115 / 120 / 129 / 133 / 147 / 152 / 154 / 157 / 159 / 162 / 166 / 171 / 180 / 190 and 200MHz.

The 694D was also a very stable motherboard as it didn’t crash at all while we were testing it.  We will put it through our normal 24-hour burn for the individual review of the board itself, but it was surprisingly stable, a much more pleasant experience than the one we had with Tyan’s Tiger 133 not too long ago. 

How We Tested

All of our benchmarks were run under Windows 2000, as obviously, we couldn’t run the tests under Windows 98SE since the OS does not support multiple processors.  For our tests we used the usual suite of benchmarks, Content Creation Winstone 2000, High End Winstone 99, and SPECviewperf.

For our SMP tests we used Ziff Davis’ Dual Processor Inspection tests, which are a part of Winstone 99, Quake III Arena (with SMP enabled) and we also ran Content Creation Winstone 2000 while encoding an MPEG movie to truly stress the need for multiple CPUs. 

For our CCWS 2000 + MPEG movie encoding test we had Windows 2000 & Content Creation Winstone 2000 running on a drive on one IDE channel while the MPEG encoding was taking place on another drive on the second IDE channel.

At the time of testing we did not have any dual BX/GX motherboards available that would run a Coppermine Pentium III which is why we could not include any BX/GX performance numbers in the comparison. At the same time, most dual BX/GX motherboards do not work with Coppermine CPUs, so be sure to check with your motherboard manufacturer before upgrading if you are currently using a dual processor BX/GX board.

Content Creation Winstone obviously benefits a little bit from having dual processors since the benchmark runs multiple applications at once, however the improvement isn't great. In any case, you can see that the Dual 133A with PC133 SDRAM is just as fast as a Dual 820 board with PC800 RDRAM and it's much cheaper to boot.

As we've noticed before, Virtual Channel 133 SDRAM (VC133) was actually slower than PC133 SDRAM and combined with the inability to use it on motherboards that don't support VC SDRAM we maintain our suggestion that it's not worth the investment. It is very clear that PC133 SDRAM isn't holding the 133A back as it performs very close to the i820 with its more expensive RDRAM.

The i840 obviously comes out on top since it does have dual RDRAM channels at its disposal, at the same time you're going to be paying a much higher premium for it.

Combining CPU intensive MPEG encoding with Content Creation Winstone 2000 proved to be much more than a single processor could handle. As you can see from the graph above, the dual processor scores were generally twice as fast as the single processor scores, showing exactly what kind of a benefit running two CPUs can give you if you're running very CPU intensive tasks.

At the same time, the dual VIA 133A is easily keeping up with the more expensive i820 platform and isn't too far away from the i840. VIA has always been known to produce value chipsets, and now it seems like we have a low cost dual processor setup at our disposal as well.

High End Winstone 99 is a single threaded benchmark, meaning it only takes advantage of a single CPU in the benchmark itself. Because of this the dual processor scores weren't any faster than the single processor scores in fact, they were actually slower. This is most likely because of the added overhead of having a second processor, but the performance drop wasn't much at all.

The benchmark does show that the 133A is still able to keep up with its more expensive competitors and actually come out ahead by a small amount.

ZD's Dual Processor Inspection tests run multithreaded versions of three High End Winstone 99 applications and thus receives a nice boost from having two processors at its disposal. Once again, the 133A is just as fast as the dual 820 and just somewhat slower than the dual 840 board but much cheaper than both.

The first multithreaded test that's a part of the Dual Processor Inspection test is MicroStation SE. The individual scores under this benchmark are pretty much in line with what we noticed for the overall scores on the previous page.

Photoshop favors the 820/840 platforms slightly but the performance of the 133A is too close to be considered to be slower.

The Apollo Pro 133A with VC133 SDRAM actually comes ahead of all other setups in the Visual C++ test but for the most part the platforms perform very close to one another.

For all of you gamers out there, the performance improvement that can be seen with adding a second processor isn't much at all. This is partially due to the fact that the GeForce2 GTS' GPU is actually offloading quite a bit of the calculations from the CPU.

You're reading the above table just fine, running dual processors under Quake III Arena at higher resolutions where the game should be video card limited is actually slower than running a single processor. We can only attribute this to a problem with NVIDIA's 5.xx drivers since we never had this problem before.

So if you're running those drivers and happen to want to play a game or two of Quake III Arena, you'll want to turn off SMP by setting r_smp = 0 which is the default setting.

SPECviewperf is another single threaded application that obviously doesn't benefit from dual processors. If you're working with any sort of professional OpenGL rendering applications you'll want to check with the manufacturer to make sure the application will actually benefit from dual processors before investing in something like the 694D Pro.

Final Words

We were extremely impressed with Microstar's 694D Pro, and if more motherboard manufacturers can put VIA's 133A into a solid dual processor motherboard design, VIA may just have created a brand new market for motherboard manufacturers.

Performance-wise a dual 133A board obviously isn't going to be as fast as the i840 but at the same time it's not going to be nearly as expensive as a dual 840 board.

From a price to performance standpoint, the 133A chipset makes quite a bit of sense to be included in entry level dual processor workstations, however since the chipset isn't quite as mature as the older BX/GX chipsets, we wouldn't suggest trying to build a mission critical server around it.

Also remember that one of the main reasons we were so successful with the chipset running with two processors is because Microstar managed to design a solid board based on the chipset. VIA can only design the chipsets, it's up to the motherboard manufacturer to step forward and properly implement the design.

Before we go, for those of you that are wondering, you can't run the newer Celerons in SMP mode on this board, the 694D Pro will only initialize one of them.