VIA Apollo Pro 133A & VCSDRAM - Part 2: The Performance

Here is where we begin to see some indication of a performance advantage brought to the table by the two 133MHz FSB chipsets. Intel's Naturally Speaking benchmark does not portray the performance of RDRAM in the brightest light, which is why it is conspicuously absent from Intel's performance disclosure of the i820 platform.

In this test, the Apollo Pro 133A uses its lower latency SDRAM to its advantage which grants it the small performance advantage over the i820. In reality, with the entire range of performance values falling within about 7% of each other, arguing over performance here is pointless as well. The main thing to point out is that the Apollo Pro 133A comes out on top once again, with the addition of VC-SDRAM offering a very tiny improvement to the performance of the platform.

Once again, the Apollo Pro 133A comes out on top and, once again, not by a very large margin. The lower latency SDRAM has the advantage in this test over the RDRAM on the i820 platform and the addition of Virtual Channel architecture increases performance by another percent, nothing too revolutionary at all.

Adobe Photoshop was used as Intel's tool to illustrate the true performance advantage the i820 + RDRAM platform offered, and it does so in this test as well. Even when armed with VC-SDRAM, the Apollo Pro 133A can't beat the i820, but once again the performance difference is only 2%, not a very large difference.