Chipset Guide

Answering this cry for help Intel released the VX chipset, commonly referred to as the Triton III which can be quite misleading since it is in no way superior to the Triton II when it comes to performance. The 430VX is plagued by the 64MB cacheable memory limit as well as poor performance as a direct cause of a lack of CPU-to-PCI buffers, something unheard of in the 430HX Chipset. However Intel made up for this by equipping the VX chipset with the ability to support SDRAM, a newer, faster type of DRAM as well as adding support for the Unified Memory Architecture, UMA for short. UMA can be thought of as a sort of pre-AGP which allows your video card to share your system memory with the sacrifice of some performance, about a 5% loss overall. Unfortunately with SDRAM and UMA support the 430VX still cannot compete head to head with the HX chipset nor VIA's line of Apollo chipsets, however it still provides excellent performance for the price.