Intel 440BX vs VIA Apollo Pro Chipset Comparison

The Slot-1 Pentium II Test System AnandTech used was configured as follows:

• An Intel Celeron 300A/Pentium II 400 on an ABIT BX6 Motherboard (BX) or an Epox P2-112A Motherboard (Apollo Pro)

• Canopus Spectra 2500 nVidia Riva TNT Video Card (16MB SDRAM)

• 64MB Mushkin SEC PC100 SDRAM

• Western Digital 5.1GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive

• AOpen 32X IDE CD-ROM Drive

• Windows 98 with all of the latest patches/drivers installed and VIA AGP GART v2.6 for all Apollo Pro tests

The benchmark suite consisted of the following applications

• Ziff Davis Winstone 98

• Quake 2 v3.17 using Demo1.dm2 and Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo

• Final Reality 1.01

Business Application Performance

From a performance perspective, the Apollo Pro is on par with the performance of Intel's BX chipset in terms of normal usage and applications.   The performance gap can pretty much be decided by the manufacturer of the motherboard with respect to what measures they take to ensure that the board is the performer it should be. 

No real performance differences between the Epox P2-112A (Apollo Pro) and the ABIT BH6 in terms of business applications, but all work and no play make this life a dull one; Let's take a look at some 3D/AGP tests to put the AGP Bus on these two chipsets to the test.

AGP Performance

The reason a Celeron A was chosen for the tests is because of the versatility of the processor, single handedly it can simulate performance at high end Pentium II levels (i.e. when clocked at 450MHz), low end Pentium II levels (i.e. when clocked at 300MHz) and the lowest possible performance with a Slot-1 processor with L2 cache disabled.

The TNT chipset served as the test video card due to its excellent implementation of the AGP2X specification, therefore showing the best (currently at least) possible throughput over the AGP bus in the Final Reality tests.