Chipset Compatibility

The major features of the new generation Socket A chipsets
will be the support of 400MHz bus and DDR400 SDRAM.

Since the new Athlon XP 3200+ processors work with faster bus, which hasn’t been used before, they require mainboards based on the new chipsets supporting 400MHz bus. All the major chipset developers, which have been producing Socket A chipsets before, such as NVIDIA, VIA and SiS, have already prepared these solutions. Let’s talk a bit more about them now.

NVIDIA deserves being called the leader of the Socket A chipsets market today. This company was the first one to launch a Socket A chipset supporting 400MHz bus. You are already familiar with this solution: it is the good old nForce2. However, the company had to introduce a new chipset revision to ensure fully-fledged support of the new Barton processors with 400MHz bus. This new nForce2 revision boasts better stability when working with faster FSB. The revision is marked as C1, and has been shipping to the mainboard manufacturers for quite a while already that is why most today’s nForce2 based mainboards will have no problems working with processors featuring 400MHz bus.

To avoid confusion, NVIDIIA will mark all solutions supporting 400MHz bus as nForce2 Ultra 400, although this is exactly the same nForce2 Rev. C1. As a result, all the features of the new chipset remain the same as by nForce2, with that only difference that they will also include 400MHz bus and dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM support.

Moreover, NVIDIA will also be offering a single-channel nForce3 Ultra 400, which will be called simply nForce2 400. This chipset will be targeted for the budget market and will allow designing mainboards starting at $70.

Both these chipsets, nForce2 Ultra 400 and nForce2 400, will be equipped with the old MCP-T and MCP South Bridges.

SiS Company also didn’t waste its time. Today this company is already shipping in mass their new SiS748 chipset supporting Socket A processors with 400MHz bus. SiS748 is an updated SiS746FX supporting single-channel DDR333/DDR400 SDRAM, Socket A CPUs with 400MHz bus and AGP 8x.

And VIA is losing the market very rapidly. Not so long ago this company was the flagman of the chipset industry, while today they are lagging behind. VIA is going to introduce its chipset solution for CPUs with 400MHz bus only in June. This newcomer will be none other but an improved version of the failed KT400A, which will be called KT600. VIA KT600 will be a single-channel chipset supporting DDR400 and AGP 8x, however, it will have one peculiarity. The new VIA core logic set will be equipped with the VIA VT8237 South Bridge, which means that it will be the only Socket A chipset with SerialATA support.

This way, AMD Athlon XP with 400MHz bus will be supported by three chipsets targeted for various price categories, which means that very soon we will also see slower processor models with 400MHz bus.

Summing up everything we have just told you, we made a table with the specifications of all Socket A chipsets supporting 400MHz bus: