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BX vs. 133A Gaming Performance


Date
: 10/20/00 – 05:24:28 AM

Author
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Category
: Chipsets

Ive started feeling a little left out of the loop, with my lack of new articles recently.  And so I tried to think up something I could do to get back into the groove.  Something Id been toying with recently was a BIOS settings article.  Just playing with the settings, running a few benchmarks, and seeing what happens.  Some might find it a little tedious, but I find that anything, which gives me the chance to learn more about my personal computer, is generally a good thing.  So, with my out-of-loop feeling, and my growing curiosity, I went to thinking how I would go about the task.  Upon thinking about what I might need to do, it just overwhelmed me how complicated something like this could very easily get.  It seemed a little too daunting for one of those whimsical articles I write sometimes (youre reading one).  This led me to try and think up something I might do.

Remembering I had a bunch of perfectly good Quake3 benchmarks left over from the 6.18 vs. 5.32 article I wrote a while ago, which I had run on my Soyo 6BA+IV (BX) board; and considering I now have an ASUS P3V4X (133A), I decided to do the same benchmarks on the P3V4X in order to compare the two in Quake3: Arena.  I have been running my P3 550E at 770mhz for the past month, so it wasnt hard for me to go into the BIOS and switch a few settings to the way they were on the 6BA+IV.  

With my CPU running at 733mhz, and my RAM running @ 133mhz 3-3-3-5, I went into the benchmarks headfirst.  Im using the 6.18 drivers, so I was pretty crushed what I saw the numbers I was seeing.  My first set of benchmarks, which were in exactly the same setup as the BX system, were around 40fps lower than the BX was.  This perplexed me for a minute or two, until I realized I hadnt reinstalled Vias 4.25a 4-in-1 drivers which come with the new 4.04 AGP drivers.  The installed drivers were whatever the prepackaged Win2k ones were.  So, I installed the drivers, and immediately saw some giant increases in FPS.  I generally have most of my BIOS settings tweaked to goodly perfection, so I wont regal you with the details.  Lets just say, this board is at its peak performance.  Here is a small table defining a few important settings and details I thought might be appreciated.

Details

Windows 2000 SP1
P3 550E @ 733mhz
SOYO 6BA+IV(BX) vs. ASUS P3V4X 1006T BIOS
PC133 SDRAM 3-3-3-5
Innovision Tornado Geforce 2 MX @ 220/200
Drivers: 6.18 Det. 3 / Win2k
4in1: 4.25a

I ran Quake 3 with all the visual settings at their fullest.

With that stuff out of the way, lets move on.  Considering you can see the title of the article with your own eyes, you can be pretty certain that Quake3: Arena will be the one and only benchmark Im showing.  If you know of any other meaningful OpenGL benchmarks that just about anyone can relate to, .  Assuming you havent already skipped down to look at the graph, go now or forever hold your peace.

Not bad.  Not bad at all.  We see here that the 133A board keeps up with the BX board valiantly, and even surpasses it a tiny bit at 1280x1024x16.  While it appears as though getting a 133A board as an upgrade from a BX board would be a mistake, you need to look at a larger picture than the one Im painting in this article.  I knew when I bought the P3V4X that my gaming performance would decrease a little.  What I was counting on, however, was the ability of my 550E to overclock higher than it could on the BX system, with the 133As AGP and SDRAM ratio options.  The memory I was using with the BX was unable to run stabily at 150mhz 3-3-3, and so with the 3:4 SDRAM/FSB ratio, I could run my memory at 112mhz 2-2-2, while my FSB was at 150mhz(825).  With any of my BX boards I had used with the 550E, the highest I could get the CPU was 825mhz, however very unstably, with the ABIT BE6-2.  With the P3V4X, I just run my RAM at 112mhz, and 825mhz is a stable and easy overclock.  So, while the 825mhz pretty much equalizes the Quake3 performance of a slightly lower clocked BX chipset board, the added benefits of everything else running at the higher speed throws the weight of balance a little more in the P3V4Xs direction.  Not only that, but the tweaking options are enough to get you to wet your pants.  Everything considered, you probably shouldnt hinge a purchase of a 133A motherboard on this little article.  Its more of an oh thats interesting kind of piece.  

If this stuff is all Greek to you, dont sweat it.  I went off course a little there with my ramblings of the strengths and weaknesses of the 133A, as I tend to do sometimes.  One of the weaknesses these boards initially had was their lack of 3D Game performance.  Before I installed the 4.25a 4-in-1 drivers, my performance was horrible.  The 4in1 drivers, however, were Vias savior.  These drivers, more specifically the AGP 4.04 driver, have brought the 133As gaming performance almost on par with the BXs.  Thats the way it is with me in any case.  As for the BX platform, it has been a staple of supreme performance for around 2 years now, and so far, nothing affordable has been able to surpass it.  Perhaps, one of these days, Via will come out with a 4.05 AGP driver that will give it that little oomph of a boost that this chipset needs to go the distance.  But that is something that will need to be seen, to be believed.