In the nearest future we expect Socket A mainboards on two new chipsets supporting DDR333 to come. They will be based on SiS745 and VIA KT333. Both chipsets will arrive at the market almost simultaneously: in February. Therefore, no wonder that SiS and VIA provide their partners with the necessary chipset samples well in advance, so that they could prepare mainboards by the due time.
A few SiS745 based mainboards have been already announced, however the solutions on VIA KT333 haven’t been made public yet. But today we came across some very interesting news about ASUS mainboard built on VIA KT333 chipset and called A7V333. Here are its basic features:

• Socket A for AMD Athlon XP, Athlon, Duron processors with 200MHz/266MHz bus;
• VIA KT333 North Bridge and VIA VT8233A South Bridge;
• 3 DIMM slots for PC1600/PC2100/PC2700 DDR SDRAM;
• 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP Pro slot;
• 6-channel C-media sound controller supporting S/PDIF (optional);
• Integrated ATA/133 IDE RAID controller from Promise (optional);
• Support for 2 ATA/133 IDE channels;
• ASUS CPU Overheating Protection via the thermal diode built into the Palomino core;
• ASUS Post Reporter, ASUS MyLogo;
• Smart Card/Memory Stick/Secure Digital Card Reader (optional);
• 4 USB 2.0 ports, 4 USB 1.1 ports, 1 IEEE 1394 port (optional);
• ATX form-factor.

Looking at A7V333 specs we feel like pointing out two things. Firstly, the chipset doesn’t support 333MHz processor bus although it supports DDR333 memory. So, it means that AMD is not going to move to faster processor core in the near future, i.e. the upcoming Athlon XP processors on Thoroughbred core will keep using 266MHz bus.
Secondly, you may have noticed that KT333 has a new VT8233A South Bridge differing from the predecessor by the integrated ATA/133 support. Probably all mainboards based on KT333 will support faster IDE-protocol. By the way, the competing SiS745 chipset does not support ATA/133.
ASUS is planning to start shipping A7V333 in February 2002.