ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

Final Words

If you've made it this far, give yourself a round of applause. We understand that there was quite a bit of information to digest in this review but now we can finally put it all together and make some conclusions.

As a high-performance graphics workstation, the ServerSet III series of chipsets should definitely be avoided until the issues we ran into can be corrected. For occasional graphics work or when using PCI adapters you should be fine, however for anything that requires good AGP performance, the ServerSet III should be avoided for now.

In terms of the competition, it is clear that the VIA Apollo Pro 133A was a good entry into the low-cost multiprocessor market when it was introduced as a SMP solution last year however it has since been replaced as such. The most promising out of all of the chipsets compared here was actually the VIA Apollo Pro 266 because it offered performance that was truly on par with the higher bandwidth solutions and will retain it's sibling's promise of being a cost effective offering.

The Intel 840 chipset is still quite powerful and is a very attractive option. The only thing holding it back really is the fact that very few 840 based motherboards exist and it is still relatively expensive to outfit an 840 motherboard with over 1GB of RDRAM; although we will admit that it is much more reasonable of a proposition now than it was 12 months ago.

This brings us back to the original topic of this review, the ServerWorks ServerSet III HEsl. Without a doubt this is definitely one of the most interesting chipsets we have seen in a while and it does get the job done. The majority of the performance tests were won by the ServerSet III HEsl with less theoretical bandwidth than the i840 chipset and while using regular PC133 SDRAM in comparison to the Pro 266's DDR SDRAM. That is really the reason for the beauty of the chipset, the fact that it can offer such high performance while still using conventional PC133 SDRAM.

The design is quite elegant, especially with the North Bridge's integrated MADP controller that provides the dual 64-bit 133MHz SDRAM ports. It is almost frightening to think about what a full blown HE based solution would be able to provide in terms of raw memory bandwidth.

The downside to this all is that the HEsl does not come cheap. The Tyan Thunder HEsl we expect will be priced much higher than $600 since that is the maximum price for most LE based motherboards. Realistically, the Thunder HEsl is an $800 board that puts it way out of the price range of many power users making the Apollo Pro 266 an even more attractive and cost effective option.

Even if the price were right, there is an unfortunate problem, which is something that ServerWorks can't do much about. And that is the fact that the Pentium III simply isn't a memory bandwidth hungry processor and can't begin to use the potential of what ServerWorks can offer it. There is another Intel processor that can however, and that is the Pentium 4. You can expect the next-generation of ServerWorks technology to be quite impressive and it will hopefully be done justice by being paired with a processor that can take advantage of it.

Looking at the even bigger picture however, there is something that is due out shortly which will be able to make a very big impact on the market. As we mentioned throughout this review, there are situations in which our dual Pentium III 733 test bed offered performance greater than a single 1.2GHz Athlon. But imagine the performance advantage a pair of Athlons would be able to offer. The AMD 760MP chipset is still a few months away from mass production but don't be too surprised if you start hearing about it sooner than that. If dual Pentium IIIs can provide this kind of a performance increase, it's even scarier to think of what dual Athlons can do.

The market may be in a slump right now, but with NV20, Palomino and AMD 760MP on the way, it's about to be upgrade season again.