I’ve made a great advance today in the research for my next column. I’ve scoured the net for any and all tweaks related to the Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset and found a really great one. In SANDRA’s memory benchmark, it brought a 103% increase in the FPU and an 89% increase in the ALU (floating point and integer units, btw). Supposedly it works for all Via-based boards, too; even the AMD ones (KT133). I have even left Loog’s (supposedly) higher performing Kingston RAM in the dust.
Now you’re asking what effect this has on real-world gaming. A lot! I’m talking about 9fps (frames per second) more on almost all FPS (first-person shooter) games. What would you do for 9fps more? Some people would suck dick for it, but not Snake. I’ve been watching the new S&L Half-Life timedemo closely and so far I have been able to tweak it up to 84fps; at the start of my testing, it was running at 67fps. And I also have finally broken 10,000 CPUMarks in 3DMark 99 Max. I’d like to know who it was that stated “the Via chipset and Viper II cards are not compatible”, cause they need to be slapped with a trout.
I should start my coding of the column by the end of the week.
