VIA’s Entry-level Processor

In the last two years, VIA has emerged as a strong contender in the motherboard chipset arena, with products ranging from the economical KM133 to the high-end KT266A. VIA is now testing the waters in the microprocessors market, after acquiring Cyrix in June and Centaur in August 1999. The first product from these acquisitions–the VIA Cyrix III–was a failure. So, the Cyrix III’s Joshua core was changed to Samuel, developed by Centaur. The processor we reviewed was based on the Samuel 2 core, and named C3.

The C3 is targeted at the entry-level market. We used its competitor, Intel’s Celeron, for comparison. The C3 fits in the same Socket 370 as the Celeron. It incorporates MMX and 3Dnow! optimizations, and runs on a low voltage of 1.6V. It has 128 KB and 64 KB of L1 and L2 cache respectively. Where it predominantly scores over the Celeron is in its 0.15 micron manufacturing process (compared to 0.18), and 133 MHz FSB support, something that has been only recently included in the
Celeron.

We used an Asus CUV4XE motherboard, 128 MB memory, GeForce2 GTS and Seagate Barracuda ATA II hard drive for our tests where we compared the C3 733 MHz to a Celeron 600 MHz.

Surprisingly, the C3 did not perform as well as the Celeron which clocked 18 percent lower. The Celeron scored 17 percent higher than the C3 in Business Winstone 2001 and 38 percent better in Content Creation Winstone 2001. This could be because the C3’s FPU runs at half the clock speed compared to other processors which run at the same speed as the core.

Though it seems to lack in power, the C3’s Samuel 2 core has certain things going for it, like the 0.15 micron process. VIA claims that the processor consumes far less power, and can even run without a heatsink. In fact, even after all our tests, the heatsink remained cool to touch. As for pricing, at Rs 2,800, the C3 costs a little less than an equally clocked Celeron. So you could consider a C3 processor if you are budget conscious and run only regular productivity options.

Anuj Jain for PCQ Labs