The
installation of the TA64B went without any problems and only one jumper was
needed to be set to determine whether we were installing either a Slot 1 or
Socket 370 CPU. Windows 98 installation VIA's 4 in 1 driver pack were installed
without hitches.
Test Bed Setup
In order to
benchmark the TA64B, we used the following equipment on all of our tested
boards...
Intel Celeron II 566MHz FC PGA
Intel Celeron 400MHz
PPGA
Tested boards : DFI P2XBL, DFI CB61, DFI CA61, DFI CW35E, DFI TA64 B,
Soyo 6BA+IV, Soyo 7VCA, Soyo 6VCA . More info about Soyo motherboards can be
found at Soyo's website
128MB PC 100 SDRAM
3dfx Voodoo3 3000
AGP
Western Digital 13000R ATA 66 hard drive
Orchid Nusound 3D (Aureal
Vortex 1 sound card)
Sony CDU611 24x CD ROM drive
On the Soyo 6VCA
& Soyo 7VCA we enabled the +33MHz memory speed over system bus option on the
BIOS. This means that the memory was clocked at 100MHz while keeping the
processor at a 66MHz bus. On the DFI TA64 B enabling this setting resulted in
stability problems and we were forced not to use it. The DFI CA61 didn't allow
us to use this setting at all. All BIOS settings were tweaked for maximum
performance on all of the tested boards.
Our software setup consisted
of
Operating system: Windows 98 First Edition, English
Busmastering drivers: Default Win98 ATA Bus mastering for Intel BX based
boards, VIA 4 in 1 4.19 drivers for all Via chipset based boards, Intel 810
latest drivers for the CW35E
Video drivers: 3dfx 1.04.00, default
driver settings, Vsync disabled, Quake 3 scores were taken with latest Metabyte
Wicked3D MiniGL driver
Sound drivers: Latest Aureal Vortex 1
drivers
BIOS: Latest BIOS for every motherboard, all settings were
optimized for best performance
Quake3 options: Normal Graphics
quality, low sound quality and all the other default options, demo001
benchmarked at 640x480
We measured business performance using Ziff Davis'
Content Creation Winstone 2000 1.0 and Business Winstone 99 1.2. I also used
Quake 3 (1.11 version) full installation to get gaming performance
scores.
Business Performance
The business performance charts show that the TA64B offers
decent performance overall under the applications utilized by Business
Winstone 99. We must take into consideration that the other VIA Apollo Pro
133A boards (Soyo 6VCA and Soyo 7VCA) had the HOSTCLK+33MHz memory setting
activated while this option was causing stability problems on the the TA64B (if
a different type of memory used, this may have solved the problem). Only a quick
Intel BX based board can slightly outperform the tested board on usual business
applications. The TA64B (like the rest of the boards based on this chipset) have
a bit lower memory bandwidth compared to Intel BX based boards.
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