OVERCLOCKING: We had decent luck overclocking with he D6VAA.  These two particular Pentium III CPUs have individually run reliably at 1125MHz, but in a dual CPU configuration have never made it past 1095MHz. (They have been installed on an Abit VP6, IWill DVD266-R and the ECS D6VAA).  We were able to hit a stable 1095MHz with the D6VAA at default core voltage. (7.5 X 146).  Although an additional 95MHz isn't astounding, especially considering the 400+MHz overclocks attained by many Athlon owners, it still offers a measurable increase in performance over stock.  You are able to adjust the FSB on the D6VAA via the BIOS in 2MHz increments, all the way up to 160MHz. The Hot Hardware Test System No Slouch...   1GHz Intel PIII @ 1000MHz. & 1095MHz. (2) ECS D6VAA Via Apollo Pro 133A Based Motherboard 2568MB Mushkin Rev. 3 PC133 SDRAM (2-2-2) GeForce 2 Ultra (12.41 Drivers) Netgear FA310 NIC IBM 7200RPM 30GB HD (2) Creative Labs 52X CD-Rom Standard Floppy Drive Windows 2000 SP2 DirectX 8.0a Via 4-in-1s v.4.32V   Performance It's good to see...

By now you're probably all wondering how the ECS D6VAA performs, so without further adieu, here come the benchmarks!  The first series of benchmarks were run using SiSoft Sandra.

SiSoft Sandra:

At our CPUs default clockspeed, Sandra's CPU tests show the D6VAA performing lower than their similarly equipped Dual-1GHz reference system, but when overclocked, our test system pulled ahead.

The Multi-Media scores are right where they should be.  Again we see that while the D6VAA is overclocked, it pulls ahead of all the reference systems listed.

These memory scores aren't going to elicit any "oohs and ahhs" from you, but considering the chipset and processors at work, these are respectable numbers.  Even with newer DDR chipsets, the Pentium III is not showing huge memory bandwidth gains, it is a limitation of the PIII's architecture.

The hard drive scores are also in line with other boards we've tested equipped with a HighPoint 370 RAID controller...which is to say they're excellent.  I think it may be time to upgrade the trusty IBM drives we use though, I'm sick of not having the top score in this test!

QUAKE 3 ARENA:

Although gaming is not the best way to demonstrate the power of a dual-CPU rig, I just wouldn't feel right without including some Quake 3 numbers in this review.

The first Quake 3 score was measured with SMP enabled using timedemo Demo001 at low resolution.  Without patching Quake 3 though, it isn't very stable when SMP is enabled.  We had much better luck with the v1.27 patch, but it has a different built-in time demo.  Demo127 is completely different than Demo001, so do not compare these upcoming scores to other reviews that have used Demo001.  We ran this test with SMP disabled and enabled...

With SMP enabled, we see an approximate 20% performance gain.  Using true multi-threaded applications, you can expect even larger gains when using dual CPUs.