VIA Apollo Pro 133: A Camino Preview

Failure #1

The Apollo Pro Plus was far from a blazing success, it did the job VIA said it would but it did little more beyond that.  In order for the Apollo Pro plus to be an outstanding success it would have to offer something above and beyond what Intel already offered with the BX chipset, that had already been given over 6 months of "testing" time in the hands of thousands of users by the time VIA started shipping the Apollo Pro Plus.  The only real feature VIA could boast about was the ability to run the memory bus synchronously with the FSB or synchronously with the AGP bus, meaning at an unoverclocked state you could run the memory bus at 100MHz with the FSB, or at 66MHz with the AGP bus while the FSB remained at 100MHz.  

In theory this would allow users to keep their old PC66 SDRAM while taking advantage of newer 100MHz FSB Pentium II processors, but you all know how well theories turn out in the computer hardware industry.  The fact of the matter ended up being that most motherboard manufacturers didn't bother implementing a method of controlling the memory clock, so in essence, the Apollo Pro Plus was everything the Intel BX chipset was.

If we had left it at that, there would be no point in going after an Apollo Pro Plus based motherboard or a BX based board, as the two chipsets would essentially be the same, unfortunately that wasn't the case.  There were two limiting factors that kept the Apollo Pro Plus from living up to the "glory" of the Intel BX chipset, memory timings, and AGP performance.  

The memory timing issue came from the Apollo Pro Plus' SDRAM timings for back to back accesses, and has unfortunately kept the Apollo Pro back in terms of overall performance in many tests, including Business Winstone, often times a key comparison factor among motherboards that "look" the same.  The performance issues didn't stop there, the AGP miniport driver and AGP implementation on the Apollo Pro Plus was noticeably slower than on an identically configured Intel BX system across the board in games.  This soured many gamers on the topic of an Apollo Pro Plus based motherboard.  

Of course the argument of price came up more than once in the whole VIA vs Intel debate, however the end result ended up being that BX boards were generally priced virtually identically to their "low-cost" Apollo Pro Plus based counterparts.  At the same time, the Apollo Pro Plus boards never boasted the same level of features and options as the BX boards did.  Case in point would be the lack of any Apollo Pro Plus based boards with on-board SCSI or RAID Port for high end systems.  Who was at fault for the lack of success of the Apollo Pro Plus?  The chipset itself wasn't horrible, but the lack of support from most motherboard manufacturers kept the public from widely accepting the Intel alternative.  

The Apollo Pro Plus did make a healthy alternative to Intel's "low-cost" ZX and EX boards, especially on Socket-370 motherboards, however the two performance issues briefly discussed above still kept the "attractive" rating of the chipset low in the eyes of gamers and performance tweakers.