Chipset Guide

by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 1997 9:36 PM EST
VIA's first attempt for the "gold" in the chipset market was with their 580VP chipset, commonly known as the VIA Apollo VP-1. Although when looked at now it seems like a poor design, during the time of the 430FX chipset and the early days of the 430HX, the VP-1 was simply the best option for most users.

While Intel was boasting support for EDO and PIO Mode 4 hard drives, VIA stole the limelight with support for not only EDO, but BEDO and SDRAM as well as UltraDMA hard drives over a year before Intel ever thought about supporting such options. The performance of the VP-1 today still isn't up to par with solutions from Intel and even more recent VIA contributions, however if you are looking for a low cost, feature rich chipset solution the Apollo VP-1 is the answer to your prayers.

It was this very design that inspired the design of the ever so popular VIA VP2 chipset as well as the VPX chipset which followed the release of the successful VP-1. Unfortunately VIA's VP-1 doesn't boast some of the Power Saving features found in the PC97 compliant VPX/97 and VP2/97 chipsets which makes it a viable competitor for Intel's 430FX and possibly even VX chipsets, however not for Intel's TX chipset which clearly holds the advantage is this case.

VIA VT82C580VP Apollo VP-1 Chipset
Common Name Apollo VP-1
Chipset Packaging Number of chips 3 (VT82C585VP, VT82C586, VT82C587VP)
Packaging Type 2 x 208-pin QFP; 1 x 100-pin QFP
CPU Support Number of CPUs 1
AMD CPUs Supported K5, K6
Cyrix CPUs Supported 6x86 (M1), 6x86MX (M2) w/ Linear Burst Mode
Intel CPUs Supported Pentium, Pentium MMX
Cache Type Asynchronous/Synchronous Pipeline Burst Cache
Maximum Supported Size 2048KB
Maximum Cacheable DRAM Area 512MB
Memory Maximum DRAM Supported 512MB
BEDO DRAM Read Timings (66MHz) 5-1-1-1
EDO DRAM Read Timings (66MHz) 5-2-2-2
FPM DRAM Read Timings (66MHz) 5-3-3-3
SDRAM Read Timings (66MHz) 5-1-1-1
Data Path to Memory 64-bits
ECC Support No
Hard Disk Controller Chip VIA BMIDE Controller (VT82C586)
Busmastering Support Yes
UltraDMA Support Yes
Max. Theoretical Transfer Rate PIO Mode 5/DMA Mode 3 (33.3MB/S)
PCI Interface Supported PCI Bus Speeds 25, 30, 33 MHz
Concurrent PCI No
Async. PCI Bus Speed No
PCI Specification 2.0 (66 MHz max.)
Power Management PC97 Compliance No
Suspend to Disk No
HDD Power Down Yes
Modem Wakeup No
System Suspend No
Video AGP Support No
Unified Memory Architecture Yes
Peripheral Support USB Support Yes
Plug and Play Port Yes
Write Buffers CPU-to-DRAM 16 QWords (?)
CPU-to-PCI 6 DWords (?)
PCI-to-DRAM 48 DWords (?)
Officially Supported Bus Speeds 50, 60, 66 MHz
Unofficially Achieved Bus Speeds 75 MHz
SiS 5598 VIA VP2
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  • vortmax2 - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link

    The good ole' days when you could put multiple vendor CPUs into the same motherboard. So simple...
  • PentiumGeek - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link

    This motherboard was on my 1st PC. I was very disappointed when faced with the problem that DIMM and SIMM memory can't work in the same time. I used Pentium 100Mhz CPU on this motherboard :)
  • Amadeus777999 - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link

    Got an ASUS P2L97 board yesterday and I'm reading through this while DoomII is benchmarking. Good times.
  • rogerjowett - Sunday, May 17, 2020 - link

    Does n e 1 know where I can find a Voltage Regulation Module please

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