by Anna Filatova
02/08/2001 | 01:28 PM
At VIA DDR Summit in Taipei some mainboard manufacturers showcased their new Socket A mainboards based on VIA KT266 chipset. We decided to particularly dwell on this event, since VIA KT266 promises to be the fastest chipset for AMD Athlon processors. And there is every reason for thinking so. Firstly, KT266 uses V-Link bus with the twice as high bandwidth than that of the ordinary PCI bus to connect the North and the South bridges of the chipset. Secondly, this chipset will support Memory Bank Interleave. As we have already seen in case of other VIA chipsets, this function allows increasing the overall system performance by about 5%.
The table below contains the list of mainboards also showcased at the event:
| Mainboard | Form-Factor | DDR DIMM | SDR DIMM | AGP | PCI | AMR ACR CNR | Additional Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASUS A7V266 | ATX | 2 | 3 | AGP Pro | 5 | 1 ACR | C-Media Sound Promise IDE ATA-100 RAID controller |
| BIOSTAR M7MIA | ATX | 2 | 0 | AGP 4x | 5 | 1 AMR | 1 ISA |
| Chaintech 7VJD2 | ATX | 2 | 2 | AGP 4x | 5 | 1 AMR + 1 CNR | C-Media Sound |
| FIC AN11 | ATX | 3 | 0 | AGP 4x | 5 | 1 ACR | Promise IDE ATA-100 RAID controller |
| Gigabyte GA-7VTX | ATX | 3 | 0 | AGP Pro | 5 | 1 AMR | Creative Sound |
| EPoX EP-8KHA | ATX | 3 | 0 | AGP 4x | 6 | 1 CNR | POST/Debug controller |
| Soltek SL-75DRV | ATX | 3 | 0 | AGP Pro | 5 | 1 CNR |