Poor multimedia benchmarks

[thymios 0]

Hi all. I've got a friend with a Celeron-500 CPU on a SOYO motherboard based on the discusting chip Apollo Pro of VIA. The specific motherboard was actully discontinued because as you already know the chipset was a nightmare for all users.

 

The multimedia benchmarks on Sisoft Sandra are amazingly poor and this causes his games to run very slowly dispite his upgrade to a Ge-Force 2 MX 400 Video card. I'm talking about a 150%-200% lower values than of other similar systems.

 

I have a feeling that the motherboard is really bad and it's causing all the trouble.Does anybody else have any other idea on what might be happening to his system?

 

For your reference, the system is running win2k pro (installed a week ago) with all final drivers+the latest 4in1 package of VIA(hate that stupid company, thank god i never made a mistake to put it on any of my systems) and he also has 128 PC100 memory.Thanks for reading.

 

Regards

[Brian Frank 0]

Well, if your friend would get some more memory, he might see an improvement. 128 is really the bare minimum you want to run Win2k or XP with, and 256 is a lot better. Also, while Sandra has it's uses, it's not a good real world benchmark.

[Brian Frank 0]

Oh, and I'm running all 3 of my machines with Via chipsets---all working just fine.

 

Also, if it was the Apollo Pro 133 chipset, that my easily explain why. The 133A (as usual) fixes those issues.

[thymios 0]

Thanks for your reply.

I don't think that memory is going to make the problems disappear, but i'll give it a try and i will take one of mine 128 bank to install it to his and see.

It's not sandra that gives these actual results but in general when the computer runs games, movies, and mainly multimedia stuff it's slow as hell and you can hear it struggling.

 

BTW no means to offend VIA, i am talking of personal experience that i've seen in other systems, and i am not trying to say to any user here what's good or what's bad.I know that 133A is better than the original Apollo, but I'm trying to find a solution without having to upgrade since my friend has no money available for his system at the time being.

 

For a start i'll take my memory to his and i'll also try my CPU(P-III) to see if the motherboard has any issues with Celeron(doubt it but there's nothing to loose).

 

Once again thanks for replying.Take care.

[Brian Frank 0]

It's not just you. I'm just tired of hearing people point fingers at Via for their problems.

 

Try the memory if you can, and look at the BIOS options.

You've tried installing the 4-in-1's, right?

 

I've heard that Soyo's mobo's have a pretty high failure rate: one guy said 2 out of 20 were good. The boards are good, when you get a good one, but the rest are trash. I know that's not comforting, but I haven't heard many good things about Soyo.

[thymios 0]

I also have a personal painfull experience with SOYO, although the main problem of the mainboard was the HPT UDMA-66 controller(you probably know which one i am talking about, i don't want to flame yet another product!).

4in1 are installed(the latest) and didn't do much of a difference.I tweaked the BIOS and i think it's the right values(i use them for lots of systems that run fine).As i said it's going to take a lot of experimenting before i actually get somewhere(if i ever do!).

 

You have to be very carefull though when choosing a motherboard because i understand after some years of PC building that it's the most crucial part for a healthy stable and fast system.

 

Anyways, enough of blabling.Will post if there's any news.