X-bit labs

VIA KT400: No DDR400 SDRAM Support.

Category: Other

by Anna Filatova

[ 07/31/2002 | 03:37 AM ]

Well, it looks as if the leading Socket A chipset maker faced some engineering problems now. While other chipset developers, including SiS and NVIDIA promise that their new products, SiS746DX and nForce2 will support DDR400 SDRAM, VIA has to give up this feature in its new product, VIA KT400.

We have already mentioned in our news and articles that DDR400, which hasn’t been yet approved by JEDEC, but which is promoted actively by Samsung has pretty doubtful reputation. DDR400 modules require a bit higher voltage and support only big timings, which makes their ability to run faster than DDR333 quite doubtful. Nevertheless, as we see from the example of the existing Pentium 4 chipsets, some manufacturers are able to solve these problems. Some of them are, but not VIA.

A good example is the performance of the VIA P4X400 (DDR400 chipset for Pentium 4) working with DDR400 memory. As many tests claim (see AnandTech, for instance), P4X400 with DDR400 SDRAM runs slower than any other chipsets with DDR333 memory. Moreover, some testers (from Gzeazy, for instance) appeared simply unable to have P4X400 work stably with DDR400 memory. This is very sad I should say.

And here the result. At the Platform Conference, VIA demoed a slide where they didn’t list the DDR400 support among the features of the upcoming KT400 chipset for Socket A:

As we see, KT400 supports AGP 8x, V-Link 8x, and only DDR333. Will this fact influence the situation in the Socket A chipset market, time will show. However, today SiS746DX and NVIDIA nForce2 look somewhat more attractive than KT400 differing from KT333 only by the AGP 8x support, USB 2.0 and faster V-Link bus.