VIA Apollo KX133 Athlon Chipset - Part 1

AMD 750’s SuperBypass

One redeeming feature about the AMD 750 chipset, at least on paper (since we have yet to delve into real world performance numbers) is something present in the latest revisions of the AMD 751 North Bridge, called SuperBypass. 

The feature, originally discovered by former AMD employee Silvino Orozco of Tom’s Hardware Guide, apparently helps to reduce memory latencies in the AMD 750 chipset. 

The SuperBypass feature was intended to be enabled on all AMD 750 chipsets from the start, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t implemented properly in earlier versions of the chipset.  The latest revisions of the chipset do feature support for the setting and if your chipset supports it then it should be automatically enabled by default.

On Gigabyte’s internal BIOS releases for their AMD 750 based GA-7IX, there is a setting under Chipset Features entitled ‘Bypass Enable(60h, bit 9)’.  This setting isn’t present in the production BIOS, but enabling it on a motherboard without SuperBypass support did not result in the feature being turned on.  If your chipset properly supports the feature then the latest BIOS update should leave it enabled by default. 

Enabling SuperBypass can result in a fairly noticeable performance increase. Unfortunately, because not all revisions of the chipset support it, it’s not a feature that you can guarantee will be enabled on all AMD 750 motherboards.