Shuttle today announced a new AK31 mainboard based on a new VIA KT266 chipset. Here are some brief specs:
- VIA KT8366/KT8233 chipset;
- Supports AMD K7 Althon/Duron FSB 200/266;
- Four 184-pin DIMM slots up to 4GB DDR SDRAM;
- Onboard AC’97 audio;
- 1 4x AGP slot;
- 6 PCI slots;
- 1 CNR slot;
- Supports ATA 33/66/100Mb/s IDE interface;
- Hardware monitoring;
- ATX form-factor.
The previous PC133 SDRAM chipset by VIA aroused a great stir when it turned out capable of competing with the DDR chipsets from AMD and ALi. New KT266 supports DDR SDRAM and hence will improve the performance in those applications, which require high memory bus bandwidth. The North and the South Bridges of the chipset are connected with a high-speed V-Link bus featuring twice the bandwidth of the regular PCI bus.
Stay tuned and don’t miss the reviews showing how good this chipset actually is.