top 4 P3 chipsets and the order you put them in

[Soulkeeper]

which chipsets (and in which order would you put them) are the best for the P3 (tualatin) ???

were via and intel the only ones who made P3 chipsets ?
what was the performance difference between the VIA models and the Intel ones ?
from an overclocking standpoint what drawlbacks would the best VIA P3 chipset have ?

thanks in advance

 

[Vette73]

I would look at a Via 694T chispet. It can take more memory than the intel ones and will support the last P3.

BUT do you have a good P3 right now? If not get a Athlon XP or p4. P3 are pretty much dead for the most part

 

[Peter]

SiS and ALi made Pentium-III chipsets too. ALi's were rarely used, and are quite slow. SiS and VIA were the only ones to make DDR RAM chipsets for the platform, SiS 635 and VIA Apollo Pro 266.

Given the slow bus speed of the P-III itself, DDR RAM doesn't help much though ... and as long as that platform had been around, you'll find little performance delta between Intel's 815, SiS 635 and VIA's Apollo Pro 133A or 266. 815 is a bit limited on RAM size and DIMM count.

SiS 635 is a bit rare to find, but e.g. ECS P6S5AT is a very decent and cheap board. VIA's chipsets are very common, mostly because Intel's later attempts at P-III chipsets didn't quite cut it.

 

[Soulkeeper]

will the older i810 chipset run a tualatin celeron ??

 

[oldfart]

815E is the top chipset. Best performing, most stable. Abit ST6 is a very good overclocking board.

 

[mechBgon]

Don't forget the Serverworks family. No 512Mb RAM limitation, for one thing.

 

[oldfart]

The 815 chipset 512 Meg ram limitation is something that 99.999999% of the typical user can easily live with.

 

[Toymaker]

815E
815EP
mobile 830MP
mobile 815EM

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

will the older i810 chipset run a tualatin celeron ??

No

 

[Soulkeeper]

alright thanks everyone

 

[CraigRT]

the 815 is an okay chipset, but it's not without it's problems
the best overall is the 440bx if you can get it to do what you need. my 815 based computer was alright.. had a few little quirks.... overall it's okay but i don't really love 815 based boards... including the EP that supports Tualitin. 440bx was die-hard!! also, i wouldn't recommend the via 694x chipsets, there is only one computer based on that chipset at my work.. which computer do you think normally gets critically low memory errors?

 

[Zap]

Hey, I have a Tualatin Celeron 1.2 (overclocked to 1.6) running on my Abit BX133-RAID, hehe.

Besides that "unofficial" support, for "officially" supporting Tualatin CPUs...

#1 VIA 694T - regardless of what VIA haters say, I actually like motherboards based on this chipset. I believe VIA had finally caught up to Intel with memory performance. Intel made a step backwards with the 815 chipset versus the BX chipset while VIA improved performance. All a moot point because we're talking what, 1% here? My "main" system is running an Abit VH6T with this chipset, running 768MB RAM and overclocked. Very stable and fast enough for my needs. I've also owned a few Shuttle AV18ET boards using this same chipset. Nice when unoverclocked, but it doesn't seem to overclock as well (PCI bus dividers seem brain dead, BIOS problem). The 694T is based on the 694X chipset which was very successful in the famous Asus P3V4X board. One more good thing about this chipset is that it can take the high-density RAM chips used in those cheap $29 512MB PC133 modules you see on PriceWatch.

#2 Intel 815EP - I don't actually have experience with the newest stepping that supports Tualatin, but I have an Abit SE6 which uses the 815E chipset, and it seems a nice board. Yes, there is the 512MB RAM limit, but as pointed out few people would be going over that for a typical home system. A limitation would be that it does not support the cheap high-density RAM modules.

#3 SiS 635 - Funny someone should mention it. I just bought one (just got it, haven't powered it up yet) from MultiWave for around $42 ($53 after tax/shipping). For those familiar with the ECS K7S5A board, the ECS P6S5AT board looks like the spitting image, minus onboard NIC. Not only does this board support DDR, but since there isn't a performance gain, cheap PC133 can be used as well. Since I haven't used it yet, I don't know how well it works or any quirks it may have, but it looks promising.

#4 well, there is no #4. For desktop chipsets officially supporting Tualatin and having AGP slots, I think the above 3 are it.

 

[Peter]

Well there's SiS 630ET and ST too, integrated graphics chipsets w/o and w/ AGP slot, respectively. Mostly found on all-in-one mATX boards, SDRAM-only. If you have leftover socket-370 CPUs that want to make themselves useful, that's the way to go.

For Tualatin support on SiS 635, you want 635T.

Finally there's the oldest of them all, VIA PLE133T ... SDRAM, integrated Trident BladeXP graphics (ARGH!), southbridge connected through PCI.

ServerWorks's chipsets are way overkill ... but they ARE damn fast on SDRAM, have brilliant ECC correction, 64-bit PCI ... and no AGP. They're for a different game, not for the desktop.

regards, Peter

 

[oldfart]

Intel 440BX/815/i820, VIA 133A article

 

[Peter]

To keep in mind while looking at the scores, Intel 440BX at 133 MHz runs the AGP bus 33 percent above specification, that's where it takes most of the speed advantage from. With i820 having been a horrible desaster, one can see VIA's 133A and Intel's 815 are about on par ... and that's before all the PCI and AGP performance patches and drivers for the former even appeared.

btw, I forgot, there's a VIA DDR chipset for PIII too, Apollo Pro 266T. This is even more rarely used than SiS 635T though.

 

[oldfart]

The overclocked AGP bus of the BX helps in some tests, some it doesn't matter. The 815 came out on top of the VIA in most tests.

Here we get a repetition of what our real world benchmarks have been showing us all along. The overclocked BX chipset comes out on top, followed by the i815 and although most of our real world tests indicate that the VIA 133A can actually pull ahead of the i820 + RDRAM platform the Integer STREAM benchmark seems to indicate the exact opposite. This could very well be pointing out the weaknesses in VIA's memory controller which place the 133A below the i815 and BX chipsets in quite a few tests.

As we get into the professional OpenGL tests you can see that there is a much larger range of scores that our 8 platforms are covering. At the top we still have the overclocked BX platform, closely followed by the i815 and then the i820 but this time around the 133A actually comes out as the slowest 133MHz (PC133/PC800) platform.

The overclocked BX setup regains the lead under the Design Review test and is followed by the i815 and i820 which are essentially tied in terms of performance. Once again the VIA 133A comes in last out of the top four.

 

[Zap]

This discussion is becoming interesting for me. When I said "we're talking what, 1% here?" I just pulled that number out of my "dark side." With the linkage provided by oldfart http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1265&p=1, I have some numbers pulled out of a calculator. Here goes...

Comparing Intel 815 versus VIA 694X at 133FSB with PC133.

A positive number is in favor of the 815, while a negative number is in favor of the 694X, rounded to the nearest thousandths of a percent.

Windows 98SE tests:

Content Creation Winstone 2000
1.967%

Sysmark 2000
1.754%

Q3A 640x480x16
-0.364%

Q3A 1024x768x32
1.564%

UT 640x480x16
2.360%

UT 1024x768x32
1.305%

Expendable 640x480x16
2.333%

Integer STREAM
10.327%

FPU STREAM
2.326%

Windows 2000 Pro tests:

High-End Winstone 99
-1.969%

Q3A 640x480x16
0.852%

Q3A 1024x768x32
1.572%

SPECviewperf Awadvs-03
3.295%

SPECviewperf DRV-06
1.090%

SPECviewperf DX-05
3.915%

SPECviewperf Light-03
-0.025%

SPECviewperf ProCDRS-02
2.802%

Taking the average out of these 17 tests gives the Intel chipset a 2.065% advantage. The article states "While we normally refrain from running synthetic benchmarks for our reviews we made an exception." This was in reference to the Integer and FPU STREAM tests. If we were to remove these synthetic tests and rely just on the 15 "real world" tests, then we get a 1.497% advantage for the 815.

Basically, you get an average of a 1.5% performance gain from using an Intel 815 chipset board versus a VIA 694 chipset board. I've seen more of a difference between different manufacturer's boards using the same chipset. As the saying goes, "there are lies, darn lies and statistics." Well, these statistics tell us to buy an Intel 815 chipset board. What the statistics DON'T tell us is if 815 chipset boards are still easily available, or even if 694 chipset boards are still available. Also, the statistics don't tell us what the price difference is, and whether the price is worth the 1.5% performance gain. Does paying 15% more for a motherboard justify getting 1.5% gain in performance? The buyer has to answer that one.

Me? Not counting whether they supported Tualatins or not, I've bought one SiS 635 chipset board, one Intel 815 chipset board and a zillion VIA 694 chipset boards (probably double digits). Except for the SiS chipset board (which I haven't used yet) they have all done the job they were designed to do and I personally cannot tell a difference performance-wise while using them.

 

[MithShrike]

Well, all I know is that I plan on getting an ECS P6S5AT from here. From one review I saw it performed the best and it's pretty much the cheapest one I've seen that can support Tualatin. Anyways, happy hunting.

 

[Zap]

Mwave.com has them for less. I've never heard of cubest, but Mwave is reputable. Sales tax if you're in California. Shipping is reasonable. For some strange reason they have this board listed twice, once at $42.12 and once at $41.73. The cheaper one says "BUNDLE W/ RETAILED." Dunno. I didn't see that one when I ordered, so I got the $42.12 deal. Shipping for me was $7.78 for ground.