Related Articles

The VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset made its debut about one year ago and with it came an uncertainty as to how it would hold up against Intel’s soon-to-be-released i820 chipset. This uncertainty quickly vanished after it became known that the i820 would support only RDRAM and not the standard PC100/PC133. For those that are unfamiliar with RDRAM, it is a really expensive type of RAM that performs quite well, but its cost is out of the price range for the majority of consumers. This announcement, paired with a release date that kept getting pushed back, undercut the interest in the i820 chipset, making room in the market for the Apollo Pro 133. Over the past twelve months the quality of Apollo Pro 133 based motherboards has increased greatly and almost all of which are solid contenders.

What you get in the box & a Horizontal Shot

The Epox 3VCA2+ is an updated version of the 3VCA2 model, which itself is an updated model of the original 3VCA that was released about 8 months ago. Some of the issues regarding the original board, such as a lack of CPU core voltage configuration, have been ironed out in these newer models, making this board a much more attractive solution to overclockers. The 3VCA2 model is recognized by Microsoft’s Hardware Compatibility List for use with Windows 2000. The specs:

A new addition to this line of boards it the Ultra DMA 100 support. While, there are currently no IDE drives that can make use of this amount of bandwidth (most drives don’t even exceed 40Mb/s), having this feature will increase the longevity of this board by allowing you to make use of yet-to-arrive technology. The same can be said for AGP 4x: most consumer level video cards just barely make use of the bandwidth that AGP 2x provides, but having that upgrade path is quite valuable.

The FSB settings should please the overclockers – 66MHz to 200MHz in 1Mhz steps is about as much as anyone could ask for. Being able to increase the FSB speed in such small increments allows you to tweak as much performance out of your CPU as you possibly can. Unfortunately the gap in core voltage settings between 1.85V and 2.0V could hamper some overclocking attempts, but with sufficient cooling this won’t be a problem in most cases. It would be ideal to be able to edit the core voltage settings in the BIOS instead of with a DIP switch, but you can’t have everything now can you?

A feature that the BIOS does take care of is the DRAM clock speed setting. It can be set to run at clock speed or clock speed +/-33MHz. So if your FSB is running at 66MHz, you’ll be able to run your PC100 RAM at 100MHz. Likewise, if you’re running your FSB at 100MHz, you’ll be able to take advantage of PC133 RAM. This setting is also helpful for reducing the speed of the RAM when overclocking.