Review: VIA C3 933MHz

Benchmarks

Benchmarks

Lets get straight to the point and see how true VIA's claims to having a super cool CPU are! Is the C3 really all its cracked up to be?
Our weapon of choice is SiSoft Sandra Pro 2001, Let the torturing begin!

These are the results for each CPU using the Shuttle SV24 test rig and the slimline heatsink supplied with the shuttle. For passive cooling the CPU fan was completely removed from the heatsink. All tests were conducted over 30 minutes

The VIA is off to a flying start!

Incredibly the passively cooled C3 was only 1°C hotter than the actively cooled Celeron at Full Load!! And a whopping 17°C cooler than the passively cooled Celeron. But surely there will be a catch …right…?

Let's find out with 3D Mark 2000 and 2001

The C3 springs a surprise!

Believe it or not the C3 scored higher than the Celeron in both 3D Mark 2000 and 2001. When I saw this I was sceptical as to how true theses scores were but no matter how many times I ran the test I achieved almost identical results. However at certain points during 3D Mark 2000, namely the CPU speed section, it is visually obvious that the Celeron was the faster CPU. There had to be something else affecting the C3's performance…..

The 3d Mark scores are unfortunately very low but this is mainly down to the Savage 4 graphics chipset. It has always been a budget chipset and just doesn't have the power of its equivalent NVIDIA or ATI chipset.

Memory Benchies

After the C3's shocking defeat of the Celeron in 3D Mark I decided to run some memory benchmarks as the only difference between the Celeron rig and the C3 rig was the processor. The C3 runs at 133MHz fsb whereas the Celeron runs at only 100MHz fsb. Does it really make that much of a difference?

In short No the 33MHz fsb advantage of the C3 rig gives no performance gains over the Celeron at all and just goes to waste. What else could possibly have given the C3 an advantage in 3D Mark? This question I cannot answer………….