Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > Motherboards > 12 Socket 370 Motherboards using VIA's Apollo Pro 133A

12 Socket 370 Motherboards using VIA's Apollo Pro 133A

07:00 - Thursday 25 May 2000 by Patrick Schmid

12. MSI MS-6309
13. QDI Advance 10
14. Soltek SL-65KV
15. Soyo SY-7VCA
16. Feature Comparison
17. Feature Comparison - Continued
18. Feature Comparison - Continued
19. Test Setup
20. Benchmark Results - SYSmark 2000 - Windows 98 SE
21. Benchmark Results - Quake III Arena - Demo001
22. Recommendations

Only six weeks ago, we compared 21 motherboards which all make use of VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset. They may be the last representatives of a motherboard generation, which is meant to die out. Yes, I am talking about Slot-1, which has become obsolete with the introduction of the Pentium III Coppermine. Thanks to a new production process, 0.18 instead of former 0.25 micron, this new CPU core made the die size even smaller than Katmai's - even though Coppermine comes with 256 kBytes of so-called Advanced Transfer Cache.

Usually, a new CPU requires a new motherboard. This affair is a bit different with the Pentium III FC-PGA, so let's check some basic questions.

Back To The Roots

As I already mentioned, the latest Pentium III processors have much finer structures. That's why the L2 cache could be integrated into the processor again. Again? Yes. Please remember the good old Pentium Pro CPU. Back in 1996, this was the first processor coming with an L2 cache memory that was both integrated into the CPU and running at full CPU core speed. The reason for doing this was of course better performance. But this new way also had two handicaps. First, the whole processor became extremely big, because the internal L2-cache was on a huge extra die that was placed into the housing of the processor, making the Pentium Pro very big and the production very expensive. Second, the 0.5 micron process used back then kept Intel from getting Pentium Pro CPUs any faster than 200 MHz.