by Anna Filatova
02/01/2001 | 07:59 PM
Lucky Star announced the launching of a new mainboard based on a relatively rare chipset – VIA PM133 (somewhat analogous to Intel 815/815E). The board is called 6VAPM and is designed in ATX form-factor. It supports FC-PGA/Socket370 CPUs, features 3 DIMM slots for up to 1.5GB PC100/PC133 SDRAM. There are also 5 PCI slots, 1 AMR and 1 AGP 4x slot, integrated S3 Savage4 graphics core. Thanks to VT82C686B South Bridge the board supports ATA/100, 2 USB ports, AC’97 sound, etc.
By the way, we think that this chipset doesn’t have any chances to become popular, because VIA missed the most favourable situation for pushing it forward into the market. Nowadays the mainboards with the integrated graphics and external AGP cards support are no longer the sales hit, so Intel 815/815E and VIA PM133/KM133 as well. They are most likely to disappear from the market pretty soon. As for us, we never perceived what sense the manufacturing of expensive chipsets with slow integrated graphics actually made...