X-bit labs

Contemporary Socket A Chipsets: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, NVIDIA nForce2 400, SiS748 and VIA KT600 (page 5)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/08/2003 | 01:26 PM ]

Closer Look: VIA KT600

The new core logic set from VIA, the KT600, is the today’s most exciting solution. It owes this extreme interest of the public to VIA’s marketing people in the first place. Even before the first samples appeared, VIA’s marketing department managed to convince everyone that single-channel VIA KT600 will be able to compete on equal terms with the dual-channel NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400. They even mentioned the new technology that will allow KT600 to significantly improve the memory controller performance: FastStream64. VIA claims that their new memory controller with FastStream64 technology features additional data prefetch buffers. In other words, FastStream64 is a sort of alternative to NVIDIA’s DASP. Well, later today we are going to find out if VIA’s engineers manage to achieve the same performance heights as nForce2.

VIA KT600 differs from the predecessor, VIA KT400A only by the official support of Athlon XP processors with 400MHz bus and enhanced memory controller. KT600 boasts full support of 400MHz bus and DDR400 SDRAM having finally acquired a complete set of PCI and memory frequency dividers. Also KT600 comes with a new VT8237 South Bridge. The remarkable thing about this new chip is the SerialATA protocol support. As a result, VIA KT600 based mainboards will have two SerialATA-150 channels. Besides, VIA has also developed special drivers supporting RAID 0, 1, 0+1, which allow building RAID arrays from Serial and Parallel ATA drives in the popular Windows and Linux operation systems. So, the functionality of the new VIA VT8237 South Bridge makes it a worthy competitor even to the recently released Intel ICH5R.

In general, after the unsuccessful KT400A, which was just a slightly modified VIA KT400, the company seems to have finally released a really attractive product. At least this is what it looks like at first glance. Let’s hope that our expectations will come true.

VIA KT600 based reference mainboard.

ASUS A7V600 – one of the first VIA KT600 based mainboards.
Unfortunately, its performance leaves much to be desired.