Introduction
First of all I want to apologize for the long time you had to wait for comprehensive motherboard reviews. Tom's Hardware Guide is of course more than just a website for technical information. The growing amount of similar products makes it very difficult to pick the right one, that's why unbiased advice and recommendations are becoming more and more important. There have been various changes inside Tom's Hardware Guide including the establishment of our lab in Germany, which enables us to cover new topics as well. We don't claim to be perfect, but we will continue to distinguish between good and bad - unreservedly.
Why Apollo Pro 133?
An answer is quite easy: The VIA Apollo Pro 133A is currently the best chipset for the Pentium IIIEB. All 133 MHz chipsets from Intel do have deficits: The i810e has an integrated graphics logic, making it totally uninteresting for most users interested in 3D-performance. i820 requires PC800 RDRAM to be fast enough, but this memory is expensive and doesn't live up to its performance claims. As an alternative, the chipset can be combined with a special memory translator chip (MTH) to support PC100 SDRAM. But even the older VIA 82C693A is faster than that. Last but not least there's i840, Intel's workstation and entry-level server chipset. It sports two Rambus channels that double the bandwidth and reduce latency while driving costs into the sky again. Thanks to the Rambus disaster, for the first time in history Intel has no proper chipset for their mainstream processors, which would make use of fast and cheap PC133 SDRAM DIMMs.
