815EP should be few percent faster than VIA chip, but you will not notice it
unless you are working on "high-end" tasks, such as play state-of-the-art 3D
games. especially the cpu is only a celeron 800, and AGP card is fairly slow
(they are holding your system back), such high hardware requirement tasks
are unlikely to be your main tasks.

815EP will also out perform VIA on high memory intensive tasks, however,
normal SDRAM (not DDR) isn't fast enough to take full advantage of it, and
remember celeron only runs at 100mhz FSB, it hardly can take any advantage
at all.

however, keep in mind that intel 815 chip only support max 512mb of RAM
physically, VIA chip can normally take much more. (latest intel 845 chip
also has terrible memory support limitation, while VIA/SiS users enjoy
better support)

I suggest you look for money saving option first, regardless who made the
chipset, both intel and VIA will do, as long as it's not ALi or SiS, it will
be okay.

***SiS does make top chipset recently, but not on their early age.

Jun Qian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Uzi Paz" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2002 8:15 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Mainboard for Celeron 800


> Still regarding the decision which motherboard to buy, I wish to make a
> more generic question. From the point of performance (i.e. not upgrades
> and features), how much will a motherboard which uses the Intel i815EP
> chipset will perform better than a one that uses the Via 694T chipset?
> Is it much better, when used with 192MB SDRAM, and Celeron 800, and some
> simple AGP card (ATI Rage Pro)? Regardless of companies, I can save money
> by concentrating on motherboards which are based on the VIA chipset, but I
> won't do it if the difference in performance is considerable.

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