Onboard graphics. Yes, onboard graphics! Stop sniggering. Now, I always say this same basic things. Onboard graphics is damned useful if you are building loads of workstations that don't need to play games. Also useful as a backup if for instance your waterblock leaks water all over your Geforce 2 GTS and you have no graphics! Gets ya up and running. Here's a little snip from the via site (which Is so much more friendly than the intel site)

"The VIA ProSavage™ KM133 brings together award winning VIA Apollo Pro133A technology with the powerful S3® Savage4™ 3D and S3® Savage2000™ 2D graphics core to provide the most advanced, feature packed, integrated chipset solution on the market"

So basically what we have here, is a good 2D and 3D performer - well for an integrated chipset... But of course, the great thing about this chipset is it has an AGP 4x slot as well. Unlike the KL133 that will be the same as KM133 but without the AGP slot (oooh nasty).

So how did it perform? I tested it against my ATI Radeon 32mb DDR and at 7x133 (CAS2). I used 256mb of memory, but with the savage 4 this is decreased by 32mb as it shares the memory (there is an option for 8,16,32mb).

As you can see, it's not amazing - but still good enough for the occasional game. I was impressed that even though the chipset had just a small heatsink placed on with frag tape - it kept quite cool. I put an extra fan on it and it was no more stable and I could overclock no further! One thing to consider is that by using shared memory, ram performance does decrease.

As well as onboard graphics, it has onboard sound. This once again is useful as a backup sound card or in a workstation enviornment just to have sound!

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